Update post

Hello again, my handful of faithful readers! You haven't had much to faithfully read these past few weeks. Sorry about that. Not too much has been happening aside from school. I had a few very big papers due that sucked up my life. Well, really, I had one very big paper and one smaller paper and all my regular work on top of that. But now it's done. I don't have a school related thing to do. Well, I do still have to go observe in a middle school, but that's pretty laid back. I'm just glad that very big paper is done and behind me. Our teacher told us we could write on anything pertaining to problem solving, so I followed my interests and chose to do something about Tetris Attack. Sigh. It was probably a mistake. Admittedly, it was easy to write at length about what was going on, but it was hard to find something really worthwhile to study about it. I'm thankfully not going to look at that data again. However I was decently satisfied with my final product in the paper. I went into a lot of detail as to why my results were inconclusive and I think it will really help me to design a better experiment in the future. Also, I know how to handle a camera now, something I did not know before. I learned a lot in this trial by fire.

Actually, I learned a lot in all my classes this semester. It's weird, but I feel like I've grown more this semester than any other to date. Maybe it had something to do with grades not being a factor. I mean, everyone gets As and if you don't, no one checks or cares. There's one of the 2nd years in my program who's attended only three days of class of something this semester (or so I hear from the other 2nd years). Interestingly enough, she seems like the best teacher of all of us from what I understand of her class. I don't know her very well, but I'm going to miss her when she graduates. She's very sweet and really likes her students. She's one of those teachers who cares a lot and makes it show in a nice way that gets her students to behave willingly. Of course, I've never been in her class, so I'm not sure of that, but from the stories she tells it sounds like it. One of her students was complaining about some work she assigned and said "Aren't you our friend?" and she replied "I'm nobody's friend!" and they were all shocked. Then she said she'd rather they hate her and succeed than be her friend and fail. That sounds like really solid teaching to me.

But anyway, back to my main point. I think not having grades really helped me focus on the material instead of pleasing the teacher. I'm not sure that would be true of everyone. We were a classroom full of highly motivated people with very high standards. Also, everything in our classes helps us with the stuff that really matters. Take my paper that helped me learn how to design an experiment and use the camera. That's the stuff I should know, and by working hard in my class, I know it.

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Ok I started writing this hours ago, but the creative juices kinda stopped around this point. Then I went and bought Super Mario Galaxy. Let's just say that put a stop to my blogging. I'll come back to this point and others later. Now I think I ought to just post this before there's too big of a disconnect between when I started and now.