School Again, What A Surprise

Proper titling rules dictate that I should not capitalize the "A," but I am ignoring that for aesthetic purposes only. Anyway, after a long three-day weekend (yay for Columbus Day), I am back into the school routine. Which, thankfully, means reduced time for annoying college things, but unfortunately, also means increased time for schoolwork.

Since my morning was rather uneventful (we watched this "how to turn a sphere inside out" video and a few Old Spice commercials during communication time, but that was mostly it), I will skip right to French, where our teacher, who I shall now call Mme Pottery, spent most of the class showing us this music video (in French, of course) whose main ideas are "Why do we have to go to school and do all this work?" and "Oh, leave it to Charlemagne, he's to blame." Then we listened to this music video by the same singer who performed at the 1967 or 1965 Eurovision contest, and it's a song about a doll who complains that since she's so pretty she should be able to have so much, but she can't have boys falling in love with her. Or that was what I got out of it, anyway.

Great use of over an hour's worth of time.

I spent a good part of econ figuring out the tax graphs and how to draw producer and consumer burdens. Now I have the concepts down, so the graphs are easier. Yay! Unfortunately, we have a test on Monday, which means I will actually have to look over the practice test (it's quite a heavy bundle), and I am not looking forward to that.

I also spent a good part of my free convincing Yuma that math team was more important than frisbee. I'm not sure how well that went. But I did get to print out all the stuff I needed to print out (except the Naviance sheet), and then tomorrow morning I will have to schedule various meetings, but I think all is going well (so far). Clay took my computer (which reminds me, I hope he logged me off), so I got my envelopes written out and reformatted my lab, and Yuma and I folded paper airplanes according to that tutorial he found online, and we spent ten minutes or so throwing paper airplanes in the hallway. Archie, who was at the corner table, stared at us weirdly. When Clay came out, I finally managed to throw a successful, airborne, non-circling-back plane. I was really proud of myself.

Then I got all of my earlies letter envelopes settled, including seeing Tea and Kathrya multiple times in the process. After that, we (although Kathrya was just in it for the walk and the Gretchen-glomping time) went to math team, where everyone was already there. To our horrendous dismay, there was only one of the round 5 and 6 practice problems each left. Oh no! So we each took one and will now have to settle for next time.

Argon came over a while later and asked Tea about RSI. It was a long, rather drawn-out conversation, by the end of which we found ourselves all sitting on tables. Ms. Sherbert looked over at us and asked, "Are you guys practicing?"

Haha. I tried one of the geometry questions, but because I was too lazy to square numbers in my head, I didn't go further.

After math team, I went to the library, where I saw Zephy and Reese. Zephy was doing her physics homework (oh, utexas, how I loathe you so), and Reese was figuring out other people's chicken-scratch handwriting, because he got a huge list of rejects from his email list for tech club or something. So I sat down and tried to figure out said handwriting with him, and I think we got a couple of the emails (Reese's way of testing to see if the emails were valid was to send out an email with the subject line "test" and nothing else). We didn't get Superman though.

Pity.

Never Make Promises You Can't Keep

Or, in my case, never make promises, period. Apparently I'm really good at attracting last-minute change in plans, because this has happened to me quite often in the past week. There was Tuesday, when I promised to get math packets for Summer and Cheryl, and then conveniently Ms. Sherbert ran out of packets. Then today, when I told Zephy that: a) I can go to fashion/jewelry/whatever-it-is-now club on Wednesday, and b) I'll be able to give her a ride home tomorrow.

Guess what?

My dad has a dentist's appointment tomorrow, all the way in New York (the state), and it's in the afternoon and my mom is going as well, so they're coming back later at night. If the weather's nice tomorrow, though, I won't mind walking. It's just—

My mom also told me today that we're going all the way up to Vermont on Wednesday to get our visas straightened out (since my dad is planning to move to Florida and everything). That is going to be fun. I'll be missing extended multi, which is rather sad, but I'll also be missing crucial review-day-before-first-test physics, which is not good at all since I'm aiming for that pencil. And I'll be missing a bio lab, which is also not good, because I am rather bad at reading bio labs. The actual labs themselves make sense. The boggy text, not so much.

But enough about my future. Today, in econ, we talked about the classic guns and butter, otherwise known as the production possibilities frontier. It was pretty easy to understand (especially the part about cows making guns), and I loved the graphs. Graphs are so nice when I don't have to draw them by hand. After econ was French, and since that was uneventful (my French teacher is almost always late to class, probably because she has to go from the first floor to the third floor, so I spend the extra time trying to look into Mrs. Cumulonimbus's class), then I went to English. Cammie wasn't here today, and we had an in-class essay.

I was freaking out (a little) about the in-class essay, because I usually don't finish those on time (or I write not so much compared to other people), but this time I actually finished ahead of time with a neat conclusion and everything. So I am surprised and not quite sure where this newfound skill in essay-writing came from, but I will assume it's because we're writing more in class now (we get free-write minutes before every class, which is really cool).

Then, on the bus, I discussed the chem test with Yuma (something about X and F, and I remember that remotely but definitely not enough to know the answer without doing the question out). I still miss chem. A lot. I wish there was a period 7 chem class, so I can drop by and say hi and everything. Oh well. Can't have everything in life.

A New Year, A New... Math Team?

I thought that an explanation of math team rules would be good for anyone who is not familiar with the system, because it can be confusing. However, it appears that a readily available version of the rules online is hard to find, because on my first try all I found was this Massachusetts Mathematics League (MML) site, which mentions:

MML follows the guidelines set forth by MIAA/MSSAA (www.miaa.net).

MIAA is the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association. Fitting, considering it's been proven before that math is definitely a sport.

Of course, I found the rules on Choate's site later (why does their school have a website for math team and we don't? I think this is one of the reasons why we have so few underclassmen). As it mentions, NEAML's rules are the same as the CSAML rules, which are the same as our rules (except for no calculators on team round and we follow small-school rules regardless of size). As it also mentions, "Postgraduates are not permitted to compete in the NEAML contest."

This is apparently very important, because in 1989, one school had no idea such an unwritten rule (at the time) existed and brought a postgraduate, so they won 89 points as opposed to the 50+ points the next best school had. And this rule was only enforced since 2005.

Yay for math team trivia!

Anyway, I am talking about all of this because we had math team today! I had no idea, though, until I met with Argon during lunch and he said that Micro told him. Apparently either Bryant or Tybalt was supposed to call me (this is from Ms. Sherbert, so I am not sure how well that was executed), but that is probably impossible because: a) they do not have my phone number, and b) I am not in the directory, so they can't even find me if they wanted to. Which they most likely did not, because I saw Bryant and/or Tybalt multiple times today, and they mentioned no such thing.

This lack of information also spread to "the girls," as they are now called, so at least it's not just me. And, of course, because they were not there, Argon and Micro were the only non-seniors, and that is problematic, because we can only have three seniors.

On round sign-up, so many people chose the latter rounds, so competition will probably be tough. Not that it was any surprise—there's Bryant (who will most likely always go), Tybalt, and then there's I-don't-know-about-Mario. I saw him earlier, so maybe he did not get the message either. I am aiming for geometry, as always (I don't understand why people don't like that round), and I am slightly better at coordinate geometry now. Slightly. I did one of the problems relatively quickly. Mass improvement.

I just hope the run-off questions won't be picked from past NEAML questions. Those tend to be significantly harder.

Of course, math team is also a social event. I got to see Yuma (okay, so I did share a free with him right before), Tea, Gretchen, Argon, and even Micro (who did not know that Yuma was called Yuma—he just knew what Yuma looked like). Dino also has a new, purple shirt. I like purple, and I guess it looks nice on him (although this is highly biased because by now I think anything not navy looks nice on him). Yuma also had a purple shirt, on Friday, and he had a new, grey shirt today. I like the new wardrobe change (well, I really, really like purple dress shirts and the like), which I think came from his trip to Taiwan. He also has a lot of new, cute things. Amazingly cute things.

Now why doesn't Bryant follow suit and get some new, non-back-full-of-distracting-designs shirts?

Busy, Busy, Really Busy

I decided to tie off some loose ends in my life lately, or at least with regards to school. In particular, I talked to my counselor yesterday about my dysfunctional classes (namely English) during lunch, and then after school I made several trips around the school trying to figure out what I had always told myself I would do, but never got around to it.

Well, I saw Mr. Booth before stat, and I asked him if he would write a college recommendation for me. He asked me to talk to him after school, so I did, and we came to a rather nice agreement (after staring at some funky multi graphs). He also told me that there will be a final math team meeting for the year next Wednesday (note: more on this to come), in the Community room. It is to be a food affair, I gathered, and it's held then so the seniors can come back from their internships (ending this week).

So if anyone was wondering when the last math meet will be, read on.

I then went to find Dr. Moles to discuss my pending AP Bio issue, but I had no idea where his office was. I tried the bio cluster first, but I didn't see him, and instead, I saw Ms. Sherbert, who told me where his office was. She then proceeded to tell me that the math meet was on Tuesday, which confused me a lot. I told her that Mr. Booth had mentioned Wednesday, so now we will have to wait and hear.

I also finally talked to Dr. Moles, who set me on the holy grail towards AP Bio.

After that, I borrowed the required reading for AP English, which is somewhat similar in plot to GWTW, so I will once again be using that as another one of my summer reading material.

Latest update today: math meeting is on Wednesday. No sushi, I suppose (although anyone who wants sushi can drop by the calc classroom early next Tuesday before the party officially starts). Also, Dino has recommended that I bring pudding, although he won't be there so it doesn't matter. I could always bring some pudding on Wednesday as a parting gift for Irving and Owen. I'm sure they'll appreciate it.

Now for things I've still got to do: HUSH portfolios, finish Othello, stat project (but it's coming along nicely because of Fathom's awesomeness), get signed up for bio somehow, and revive my clubs.

Ha, homework? What homework?

Mrs. MacDonald had told us that period 6 would have a stat party today, and Micky said, "Oh, we should have had a stat party today. It would have been perfect."

Perfect, because we don't meet on Fridays, and the seniors will be gone on their internships next week. Not so perfect, because half the class was not here due to the AP econ/world tests. Of course, we conveniently skipped over that fact and only lamented on our lack of forethought and preparation. Then, Ali asked if we could go to lunch, and Mrs. MacDonald agreed, so we got an extra fifteen minutes.

Tea had told me earlier that Ms. Sherbert had my Le Petit Prince book, the one that I had lost on the bus during my trip to New England's, so I went to find her. On my way to her office/supply room, I saw Argon and one of his friends outside the chem room (there are technically more than one room for chemistry, but I have had both years of chem in the same room, so I call it the chem room). I asked him about the stat party, and he said, "Yeah, we're having a party in stat." Hint: there is foreshadowing here.

Yuma then walked by, and so we had a gathering in the hallway, talking about our ridiculous day so far (half of the people in almost all of our classes were not there). Then Mr. Turkey, the chem teacher, came along, and so the sophomores went inside.

"We should go in and say hi to Mr. Turkey," Yuma said. Yuma and I were in the same chem class with Mr. Turkey last year. I agreed, so we went in, where Argon was seated in the front row, and Yuma pointed out the seat behind him and said, "I used to sit there."

I pointed to Chrissy's seat, which is next to Argon's, and said, "I used to sit there."

There was also a name joke here made by Argon (although I had noticed it a long time ago, and mentioned it to him before, but he probably used that part of his memory-brain to remember some crucial fact that could save the world but that I can never remember), but the joke is better with our real names.

Several hours (maybe two) later, as I was walking to my health classroom, I saw Argon again, and I asked him how the stat party went.

"Oh, it was supposed to be tomorrow," he said, but he had a piece of cookie with him, so I assume other people forgot as well. "We just got a packet."

"Yeah, so did we. Then we just did whatever we wanted, which was mostly homework. I've been busy doing so much homework in my AP classes now."

"Why, do you have a lot of homework?"

"No, I just don't do them at home anymore."

To be fair, I haven't really been doing anything in my other classes either. In US, we watched a movie (granted, Civil Rights related). In health, we played health/STI/drug related Sporcle quizzes, then digressed to other, non-health specific quizzes, such as naming the first 151 Pokemons. But that wasn't nearly as fun as my physics class, where we merged with an A-level class and listened to the potential physics teacher candidate's lecture and did a lab with lasers, jello, and real, metal knives.

English was the only class I actually did work in, and I linked Huck's decision to save Jim to the white supremacy we were learning in US. One of the reasons why I like taking English 3 (which focuses on American literature) and US history together. I've been able to do these connections between the two classes for almost every unit/book.

"80, that's definitely a solid B." (Math Adventures—Part IV)

Continued from last time, where we had just finished round one and were going on to round two, but since this has been drawn out for so, so long, I will effectively condense round two and round three (during which Mario and Tybalt tried to find what room Argon and I were in, but failed because they didn't turn around and see me), and this latest edition will begin as Argon, Micro, Dino and I were all back in the cafeteria (basically after round four, so Mario and Tybalt have gone off to do round five).

"How are we doing now?"

"Round two was brutal. We got six points—Treeburg got twenty."

"There's no way Treeburg got twenty points," Dino said, standing up to go over to the score-projector. We followed him and confirmed this sad reality, and then came back to our table again.

"So, there goes 159," Micro said.

"159?" Dino asked, feigning confusion (I was pretty sure he was feigning, because he went on to ask "confusedly" what 162 was, when he was the person who first brought it up).

"Hey, Micro," I said. "Take 162 and multiply it by 0.8 on your calculator."

Micro punched in some numbers and said, "129.6."

"Okay, that's our new goal. 130."

"Why?" Argon asked. "What's 130?"

"That will give us a solid B."

"That's not a solid B," Dino said. "That's a low B."

"80 is definitely a solid B. In the grand scheme of grade-keeping, it doesn't matter what's added to the B at the end."

"Whatever." Dino chose to go back to explaining cos x as a Taylor polynomial to Argon, then added the two together to form the Taylor polynomial of e. After some fiddling and manipulation of numbers, he circles the final result—a degenerate Euler's formula, without the one or zero.

"Whatever," Dino said again as I pointed out his lack of zeros.

"I get how you derived it," Argo said, "but I don't understand how you can take something to the i power. I mean, what does that mean? How do you do it?"

"Well," Dino said. "It just is. You don't ask 'how.'"

Skimming over more trivial events (Micro, Argon, and I testing out more suspicious gelatin-marshmallow candy flavors, Mario claiming that we may still have a chance against Treeburg after seeing their dismal round four scores, and Bryant wondering if he should sneak in a TI-89—not allowed, but unlikely that the proctors would see the difference between that and a TI-84, which is allowed—for the team round questions), this final installment of Math Adventures sees us about to hear who the winners for the state match are. Half the schools (those who figured they would never make top three anyway) had already left, but of course we were not concerned about them. All we cared about was whether we had defeated Treeburg or not.

"And now, in second place for the large schools—"

"If we win," Dino said, "I am going to scream."

"—Paperclip High School!"

Well, so much for hearing him scream. Since the next part(s) is boring, I shall fast forward it. Basically people got their trophies (if any), got on the bus, made lots of noise, Ms. Sherbert asked "all the Paperclip kids to count off and see if everyone's here," to which Mario responded, rather immediately despite his poor view in the back, that yes, we were all here, and then we got back to school. As you can probably see, I have kind of forgotten all the details.

Nevertheless. There is math team tomorrow. The adventures continue!

(UPDATE: Our team made it to the top twelve in the Moody's challenge! YAY! We get a scholarship prize of $1500, which I have no idea how it's going to be even given to us, but nonetheless, top twelve! That is so amazing. As a side note, I am surprised that the Mario-Irving-Owen-Tybalt-Bryant team did not do as well as ours (although they made honorable mention), seeing as their paper seemed much more mathematically based, and ours lacked a conclusion. Perhaps we were so amazing that they overlooked those minor details.

Or so I'd like to believe.)

Math Is Definitely A Sport

I am not much of a sports player (seeing as every sport I play—except maybe for KanJam, which I believe I am quite an expert at because I can aim a frisbee into the tiny slot on those KanJam cans—can be described with the words, "flailing arms everywhere and horrible hand-eye coordination"), so I do not know what a real sports team is like, at least among the players themselves. I cannot claim that solving complex geometry problems is the same as scoring a goal in lacrosse (which I still have no idea how it's played, but I'll probably ask soon).

However, math is most definitely a sport in its own right. It's competitive, we have a team, and we have matches and rivals and most of all, there are different levels of competitions.

In fact, our rivals in math are pretty similar to our rivals in, say, soccer or football.

Anyway, I promised earlier that I would blog about the state math meet, and so, after much homework-tackling and procrastination, here it is, a transcript of (nearly) everything that happened.

When I handed in my permission form on Monday, Ms. Sherbert told me that we would have a dismissal at one. I went on the website that night and checked the schedule (because I only have end-of-class times memorized by the minute hand, not the hour hand), and realized that I would still technically have to go to period 5, my calc class. But everyone was going to be taking a test that I had already taken anyway, so I figured that I wouldn't need to stay. That was what I told Argon (who has half of period 5 free, lucky him) during lunch, and he agreed to come with me upstairs to see Mrs. James and tell her that I was "skipping."

We made it halfway there when we saw Micro wandering down the hall in the opposite direction.

"We have the entire period off, right?" Micro asked as we approached him.

"Well," Argon said, "our dismissal's at one, so you still have to go to period 5."

"Oh, well, I have Spanish, so I'm skipping."

For students who supposedly represented some of the "brightest of Paperclip High," as Mr. Stone said the other day before AIME (while Tybalt stood on a swivel chair trying to dismount a projector, and Mr. Stone commented on what a shame it would be if Tybalt fell off and hit his head), we sure love going to class.

Micro followed my entourage (which expanded from one person to two) upstairs as we debated the world language department. Once we got to the calc classroom, I slipped in and explained the situation to Mrs. James.

"Where is Dino?" Mrs. James asked. "You guys have half an hour. He could have squeezed in part of the test today. Oh, he's such a slacker."

Later on, as we wandered the halls some more, Argon said, "I feel kind of bad for feeling sorry for everyone who's stuck in class while we're out here."

We had just walked past the ASR room, and I suggested that we go back and say hi to Tea and Mario, but this notion was dismissed as soon as we saw Mr. Fisher.

"Hey, Mr. Fisher," said Argon, who had had him for bio last year. Mr. Fisher nodded hi to Argon and I, and then spotted Micro.

"Where were you yesterday? Were you skipping?"

"No," Micro said. "I was sick yesterday."

"Sure you were. You were skipping yesterday, and you're skipping now."

We then made our way to the library, where I spotted Irving, Tybalt, Bryant and Dino sitting at a table together. Looks like everyone (except Mario, who, according to Tea, was in ASR, and Argon, who actually had a free) decided to skip.

After half an hour of basically doing nothing (I printed out all of my US documents, but that was about it), we re-congregated at the front door, where another school was already there waiting. I could not figure out what school it was, although it may have been the high school from the town next to ours. The bus still had not arrived yet, so we loitered in the lobby.

"Dino," I said, turning to him. "Mrs. James said that you're a slacker for not taking the test today."

"Oh, yeah," Tybalt agreed. I'm not sure how he knows this information, as he was in the library for the entire time, but perhaps he has superpowers I am not aware of.

"Come on," Dino said. "Cut me some slack. I'm not going to take half the test today and then take the rest on Thursday. I have a research paper due."

"So do I," I said. "And I took mine already."

"Yeah, well, English is your first language." Right. That made a lot of sense.

"No, it's not," I said.

"Yes, it is. It's not mine."

"What do you speak then?" Bryant asked. "Robot?"

The bus came at this time, so all discussions about Dino's robot status ended. Micro headed the line to go on the bus, which was already filled with people from other schools (I spotted Treeburg's red sweatshirt), and sat down in a random row. Argon sat next to him, and I sat across from Argon. Since there wasn't enough space left for the rest of them to sit together, Mario led the rest of them towards the middle of the bus.

The bus ride itself was rather uneventful, either because I didn't sit anywhere near Mario (and his gossip central), because I sat in front of Treeburg, who were all playing Pokémon loudly for some reason, or because I had lots of work for US that I had to do and I didn't want to be too overburdened. Probably a combination of all three. I did manage to get Argon to promise that he will trim down his backpack by the end of spring break ("You'll be really surprised at the results," or so I've been told), and highlight several documents (except the one that had "centrifugal" forces, which I rejected to the bottom of the pile because centrifugal forces do not exist and is obviously false).

Ladies and gentlemen, we will be right back after I sleep for the night, finish my EOQR, my essays (note the plural) and review for my finals the commercials! Stay tuned to find out what happens next!


(A.k.a.: I am tired now and will go sleep, but I've already written half of this, so I might as well post it now and then be lazy and write the rest later.)