(this is a long one… at least to me)
Something that I primarily wanted to do when I first started this blog was to write about my daily life and share any memorable snippets that I might want to remember for the future. The problem was that basically nothing exciting would ever happen during the summer. Everyday became pretty mundane, so much so that I honestly got to a point where I was actually anticipating my first day of Grade 12. Now that school has finally started, it means I’ll finally have something to write about. But more importantly, all that studying I did over the summer will finally come into use.
Anyone who saw my last blog post would know that my first semester is anything but easy. But you have to understand, I’ve always been interested in math and science, especially so this past summer. And evidently enough, I’m honestly fine with having Physics, Advanced Functions, and Data Management in one semester. All of these classes are simply a different application of mathematics, and I think they can all be interesting in their own right.
There’s one subject that I left out though, which is English. I’ve never been a fan of English. It might have something to do with the subjective nature and lack of formulas, but I think the biggest reason is that it’s just not interesting to me. Personally, the most important factor that helps me learn something is actually wanting to learn it and being interested in the topic. Of course, your interests can change over time—like how I didn’t love physics nearly as much I did about six months ago—but English is something that never truly clicked for me. It’s not that I hate reading or writing; I’ve actually quite enjoyed both of those things in the past. The ability to analyze an author’s message, and trying to argue for a specific theme is something I’ve pretty much hated doing throughout all of high school. And don’t get me wrong, I’ve always wanted to improve at this. The problem is that it’s just not as easy to study as something like math is. The lengthy process of writing an entire essay, and not even having a subjective answer for it, is what really gets me.
Anyway, before that rant about English class, I was hoping to write about my classes so far. So here it is.
Period 1: Physics
I think this was probably the class that I anticipated the most before school started. The content learned in Grade 12 Physics is immensely more interesting than in Grade 11, at least in my opinion. Mixed with the fact that I just so happened to get a great teacher for Physics, this is probably my favourite class out of the four. I won’t reveal the names of any of the teachers I mention in my blog, ever, but I just feel the need to say that my Physics teacher is someone who seems incredibly enthusiastic about physics in general. Something that I’ve always hated seeing is a teacher who doesn’t seem to enjoy teaching a course, or worse, not enjoying teaching in general. Having a teacher like this is something that takes away something special from the learning process, at least for me. That’s why I was so happy to see someone who genuinely enjoys what they do.
So far, basically all we’ve done is review, which sucks because I’d rather get to the new stuff earlier rather than later, but it makes sense to go slowly rather than guns blazing. Especially for those who haven’t done physics since first semester of last year.
Period 2: English
This class is unsurprisingly the most boring out of the bunch for me. I don’t think the teacher is subpar when it comes to teaching by any means, and I don’t hate his lessons at all. But they’re purposely structured as being very slow and deep into the “theory” when it comes to analyzing texts. I’ve honestly learned a lot from them, but at a heavy price of a ton of boredom. Yesterday we spent the majority of class analyzing this specific exercise from Voice Lessons by Nancy Dean:
As I watched, the sun broke weakly through, brightened the rich red of the fawns, and kindled their white spots.
Over half of that class was spent deciphering what the author could’ve possibly meant by the word “kindled.” Our teacher eventually showed us how the process of kindling mimics the slow structure of the sentence by being an inherently slow procedure of creating fire from what seems like nothing (along with a lot of other things, but I won’t bore you). He went on to explain how it’s actually absurdly difficult to come up with a synonym to replace “kindled” and have the same connotation. I’m going to be honest, although I heavily dislike English, this lesson actually was a little interesting to me, as I’ve never thought so deeply about what the meaning of a specific word in a sentence could imply without being directly written. This, unfortunately, does not mean at all that I’m good at it. But it does mean that I get more opportunities to practice since the original practice book was riddled with sentences just like this one.
Period 3: Advanced Functions
If you’re wondering why I decided to post this blog post 2 days after the first day of school, this class is exactly why. Our MHF4U teacher decided to give us a “fun Friday,” (what she called it, verbatim) by giving us a quiz on factoring on the third day of school. Originally I didn’t mind at all, since it makes sense to have a quiz on basic skills you learned in Grade 10. But I was really, really wrong. These weren’t Grade 10 level questions at all. These questions required genuine algebraic skill and pattern recognition way beyond normal trinomials. Take this question for example:
A question of this difficulty was luckily not on our quiz, but a similar question was on a practice sheet of another class. From a Grade 10 perspective, this question looks just about impossible, since it really doesn’t make sense for a sum of two even powers to be able to be factored. Factoring problems you deal with in Grade 10 usually are quite straightforward, with the next step usually being quite obvious when you do a couple problems. In harder factoring problems though, the next step to take is very often not obvious whatsoever. For this case specifically, you must complete the square to create a perfect square trinomial, and then use the difference of squares property.
Although this and other factoring problems seemed incredibly difficult at first sight, it really does make sense for it to be a first quiz in the course: It tests both your factoring skills and your algebra. Because at the end of the day, MHF4U is just a precalculus class that tries its best to ready your algebra skills for calculus. And these problems were always as rewarding as they were algebraically challenging.
Period 4: Data Management
Yeah, there really isn’t a whole lot to say about this course, mostly because all we’ve been doing is review content. Not difficult review either, it’s mostly just basic algebra skills and stuff you’d normally learn in Grade 9 or 10. Out of all the STEM courses that I have for Grade 12, Data Management is by far the one that I know the least about. I originally took it because I needed something to take in order to swap out of Biology, and it made the most sense to me to take a math course.
I honestly have no idea if I will enjoy this course or not. Statistics is a type of applied math that I’ve never tried dabbling in before, and I’m not familiar with probability whatsoever. When it comes to applied mathematics, I’ve only really ever looked into the math that govern real world phenomena, rather than trends or numerical data. But I have found certain parts of math in statistics quite interesting, notably the normal distribution and factorials. A while back I watched an incredibly interesting video on why π is in the normal distribution, and I would recommend it to any math people out there.
Yeah… a bit of a long post this time. That’s ok.