so close

Oof today was hmm, tiring and fun at the same time. 

So I wake up at 7:45 cuz the Model UN competition was supposed to start and 9 and I still needed to get ready, eat, dress up, and maybe even formulate a few plans before the committee opens. 

Now, it's 9 and I'm sitting in front of my desk with my suit and everything waiting for the host of the zoom meeting to assign me to the breakout room for my committee. Oh btw, my committee for this competition is the Treatment of Aquatic Animals in Japan. 

It's a junior committee so we veterans have a slightly higher chance of winning an award since we have more experience than the first-timers. However, since this is the first online virtual competition the league of MUN is abandoning its old rules with the different statuses of novice and veteran. With the new regulations, it's everyone against everyone. Free for all fight. 

Everything was going great, we talked a few times, got a couple more delegations to join our bloc, all the good stuff you know? Then comes lunch which is 1 hour long even though I probably only spent 5 to 7 minutes eating lunch and the rest on the working paper. Oh right, you most likely don't know what a working paper is. Basically, each bloc makes one working paper which is a document where all the delegations of this particular bloc will write their plans into in accordance with the agenda that was decided on the previous day. 

Also, each bloc needs to decide on sponsors. In our case, there were two blocs so each group was able to have three sponsors. Now, I'll tell you what was SUPPOSED to happen. 

After the two blocs finished their working papers in an unmoderated caucus which is just working and discussion time for each bloc, the chairs of the committee will send your working paper to the opposing bloc and vice versa. Consequently, after each of the blocs read the other bloc's working paper, the NON-sponsors are supposed to ask questions to each other based on the information written in the paper. HOWEVER, there was a little situation today. 

Because of Jerry's INSANE communication and recruitment skills, I was able to convince 10 delegations to join our bloc. TEN. And there were only 15 delegations that were present in total. What does that entail? 

It means that our opponent, the other bloc, only had four delegations. So with our own delegation included, the sides would be 11 to 4. And that's not even the harshest part. 

The worst part was that only the NON-sponsors were able to ask questions and answer the questions that were asked to them and with three mandatory sponsors on each bloc... That leaves the other bloc with only one non-sponsor delegation. 

Meanwhile, our bloc had 11 delegations so we had 8 non-sponsors. This means that if the debate were to have occurred, it would have been 8 on 1. LOLLL, as you can see, it was obvious who was going to win. Us of course. 

And for this reason, the chair decided to abandon the debate as the result was quite evident already. You should have seen the look on the chairs' faces when they heard the other bloc was outnumbered to such a large extent. Haha, the expression was absolutely priceless. Anyways, they were really puzzled and didn't really know what to do at first but later on, just decided to not continue on the normal path and to resume moderated caucus. The rest went pretty smoothly but we didn't talk as much and I believe this is the main reason why we got the ranking that we did. 

Finally, the committee came to a close. Now, we wait. Wait until the chairs of all the committees finish counting the points for each delegation to pick out the winners. I think we waited for about two hours or so and played around 7 different Kahoots. Each Kahoot was filled with at least 50 people or more and surprisingly I won one of them LOLLL. 

Ultimately the moment we've all be waiting for came. And we got fourth place. FOURTH! Just one place away from top 3. Sigh, oh well I actually think that's quite good considering the fact that I did absolutely NO research on the committee until Thursday night MDR but I strongly believe that next competition we can take home one of the top three places. All in all, really not bad and I think if we just talked a few more times then we might've gotten third. Well, it's too late to be thinking about that now. I'll go on ahead to bed now, cya!

head start

Today was pretty interesting. 

My classes went by rather quickly so I'll just do a very fast recap on all of them. 

Physics we talked about energy, different forms of energy. Chemical, mechanical, thermal, radiant, etc. He assigned homework to make a video on examples of energy that can be found at home. 

Music, didn't do anything. The teachers talked a little between themselves and there was some laughter but the students barely said anything. 

PE, hmm we were assigned to write an essay. ESSAY. Three paragraphs. What is it about? The first paragraph is on my strengths, the next is on weaknesses, and the final one is on topics of interest. I had some trouble with the second paragraph since it's pretty hard to talk bad about yourself but other than that it wasn't all that difficult. 

Algebra, took a really short quiz. 

English, worked on an analyzation chart on the text, 

Spanish, talked about a quote from Charlie Chaplin. It goes something like, "Life is a show doesn't allow rehearsals. So you need to laugh, cry, and live as intensely as possible before the curtain comes down and the show ends with no applause." I might've phrased some parts wrong but that's the main idea and I like this quote quite a lot actually. 

The last part with the curtain coming down with no applause was great in my opinion because he used his experience on the stage as an analogy to life. Pretty smart. We also discussed some factors to writing a good essay and I am not excited to write my first Spanish essay. 

Finally History, the whole class consisted in mostly a survey. We took a survey that had lots of questions and one of them was, do you think everyone in your group did the same amount of work? And to answer honestly. Well, what am I supposed to do? Throw my teammates under the bus? At the end my friend came up with a clever way to say what happened in a nice acceptable fashion. 

I said that I did a large amount of the research and the outline but my teammates upheld the debate for me in my absence so in the end, it all evens out. Mhm, I'd be happy with that response if I were the teacher. 

OH and then today's the first day of my Model UN competition. My delegation is the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research or NIPSSR for short. Our committee is going ok for now but we didn't get too many chances to talk today. 

However, we DID in fact manage to recruit some other delegations into our bloc so maybe at the very end we can make a comeback and win it all with our resolution paper if it passes. The more amount of delegations that join our bloc the more votes we'll have on our side. That's why we need to move fast in finding as many allies as possible in the shortest amount of time. 

I already have a WhatsApp group chat made for the members of our bloc and so far I believe we have 5 or 6 delegations on our side. That's not bad for the first day because the unmods haven't even started yet and that's usually when most of the people go and divide into groups. Thus, we already have a head start on them. We'll see how it goes tomorrow. Adios everyone. cya tomorrow 

 to be decided...

I'm tired today and it's late so I'm just going to write some keywords here and I'll elaborate some other time.

Physics, 6th quizziz, quiz 7/8, energy and work. 

Racial colloquium, dj guy, experience in school. 

Excursion to a line of rocks, in the ocean, first driving experience. 

Results of the olympiad,  16 points, worse than worse-case scenario, honor mention. 

 and we're done

So, I just spent around 20 minutes finishing writing my blog for yesterday so I'm going to continue from here.

Personally, I think today's test went worse than yesterday's. Why? Because the first problem was a geometry proof, the second was another proof, and then the third one was actually a doable one but since it's the third one I need to be careful as it tends to be the most difficult one. 

OK as soon as I get the test I glance at the first problem and there it is. In all of its glory, a geometry problem. I mean I was expecting it since there was no geometry at all yesterday and each olympiad MUST have at least one problem from the four topics of Number Theory, Geometry, Combinatorics, and Algebra. Therefore, since there were none on yesterday's it has to appear today. Now according to my teacher whom I gave the problems after the test, he says that this first geometric proof is actually really simple. wow. I spent like 2 hours on that problem. 

Now a lot of that time went into getting the diagram right because without a good drawing you're bound to go wrong at some point in the problem. It took me around 6 tries to finally draw a good drawing. Then I was stumped. The problem asked that we prove two lengths are equal and I did in fact deduce that we had to use congruent triangles however the only question was HOW DO I PROVE THEY'RE CONGRUENT? Then I did what I always do when it comes to these geometry problems. angle-chasing! I did a ton of angle chasing until I reached a dead end. 

Time was running short so I used a little trick that probably won't work. So after a whole bunch of equations and relationships, I wrote, "From here, it's quite easy to see how angle blah and angle bleh are congruent and thus by ASA congruence these two triangles are congruent to one another. Therefore, using CPCTC, length A = length B. And we're done." I said it in a way that seemed like I knew how to find that but I actually didn't show the real process for it so... I most likely won't get the points from that but it was worth a try with such little time left. 

The second question today was a bit weird. It was another proof problem and we were given an inequality that we had to prove was true for all k where k was any natural number. You know what? This smells like proof by induction to me so I used induction. Hmm, it was all going swell until the final part in the inductive step where I didn't know how to prove the final step was true no matter what k was. And so, I used the exact same trick as last time. I just made something up and used a writing tone that seems very confident to hopefully influence my grader into thinking I'm correct even when I'm probably not. Sigh, you know it would be awesome if they also graded based on your writing skill. How clear you were able to send the message and OH how fun it was to read it. Haha, I think my solutions were all pretty fun to read. 

Last problem, now I think this was probably the easiest problem for me today. Why? Because it wasn't a proof and you could find the solution by using brutal force. Yup. I really want to say that I specialize in the usage of brutal force but then again that's not exactly a good thing in most people's eyes. For them, brutal force isn't methodical, you can't repeat it over and over again like a well-oiled machine. Well, that's what makes it so FUN. The fact that each solution is found only by using a special way that only worked for that problem. The thing is, lots of people don't want it to be fun. 

They just want to use theorem after theorem, identity after identity, and solve the problem using boring old methods that always seem to work if used correctly. Oh and I think another more logical reason for not using bashing is because it's quite easy to make a mistake. People aren't calculators, we can count wrong every once in a while too, and when you bash you're more predisposed to making a mistake compared to when you're using a very well known methodical method. 

But nevertheless, I solved the problem and I'm pretty sure the answer is right. That's all there is to it. 

My estimation for the points today are 9. Worse-case scenario once again. 2 points for #1, 1 point for #2, and 6 points for #3. Yup, that leaves my grand total as 20 points which might be a bronze depending on the cut-offs. OK gtg, cya!

 one more to go

Hello, it's Jerry here.

I'll just tell you about how the test went.

Ok so the test is 3 problems and we're given 4 hours and 30 minutes to solve them. You might be thinking, Woah that's way too much time for only THREE problems. Well, think again. I mean they give that much time for a reason, right? First of all, these problems aren't your typical 1+1=2 simple problems. These are complicated difícil problemas ok? And then secondly you can easily get mistaken on these problems and then get carried away for 30 minutes to maybe an hour on the wrong path. When you finally realize your mistake you must redo ALL of your processes from the start and that takes time. Then there's also the problems that even if you're doing it all in the right way it's just so hard that it takes you a lot of time. 

Anyway, fast forward to when we start the test. I get the paper and the first problem looks doable. What do I mean by doable? It means that I can find the solution by bashing or using brutal force. If you really didn't look too much into the problem you can actually still solve it by calculating the square of around 100 numbers. Two-digit numbers. What I did was to first find a range of what the solutions could be in and test all the numbers in there. Yeah, only close for 70 numbers. 32 to 99. The square of each of those numbers calculated by hand. At least, that's what I thought I had to do. Then I remembered that there's actually an easier way to find the squares that are one after another. Look at the squares from 1 to 10. 

1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, 81, 100. 

It's adding 3, then 5, then 7, then 9, see? It goes up by 2 every time. And so by adding each time instead of multiplying it all out I was able to finish quite a bit faster. I got the answer to this problem correctly too. 

The second problem, oof this one was harder. It was a combinatorics problem. We were given the description of a game and we had to figure out which numbers worked for this particular game. My process for this problem was literally tearing up a paper into 16 equal pieces and just playing out all the possible combinations one at a time until I found a pattern about which ones worked and which ones didn't. Surprisingly, I got the answer to this one right as well. 

Now, what does this mean? It means that I solved two of the three problems already only by BASHING. How crazy is that? Moving on to the final problem.

The third and last problem for today was with functions. According to Beam, it was supposedly really hard but I thought it looked fairly simple to me. This means either I'm too blind to see how hard it is or Beam is wrong and it's easier than he said it was. It's probably the former. 

Anyway, I found A solution to the problem but it asked for ALL possible solutions so it's completely possible that I might've missed one. However, I'm 100% sure that the solution I had was correct the only question now is if I overlooked one or not. 

Oh well, overall I feel pretty good about my performance today. After giving myself some room for error, my estimation of my total points will be 11. 11 points. Remember that it's 7 points for each problem. That's the full credit.  I'll say 6 points for the first one since I used only bashing so they might take off one point for not using a more "elegant" method. And then for the second one, I'm giving myself 4 points for getting the answer correct but not really using an olympiad acceptable method. Finally, I'm only giving 1 point for the last one as my process was a bit weird and unorthodox, plus I feel like I missed a bunch of solutions. Remember that this is the worst-case scenario. I'm deducting an awful lot of points for dumb things but I kinda think that's how the judges will be grading LOL. 

Yup and that's it for the first day of the competition. Now I'm going to write day 2. 

 

 shambles?

Tomorrow's the big day. My mom wants me to go to bed at 9:30 because I have to get up at 6:30 tomorrow and get to the testing site at 8. I still attended class today like normal today though because there wasn't any reason not to. 

My first class of the day was English. At the very beginning of class, we needed to write a small response to a question that was given to us and it was worth a full 5 points. I mean the quick writes were only worth 8 points in total and we were given a whole day to edit that. I know it looks like 5 points are really little but in English, it's quite a lot because she rarely gives anything for points. And even when she does it's worth very little. With a grade calculation system like ours, our final grade is based on total points and not on percentages. If she gives assignments that have little points then it'll be harder to get a good grade at the end. Hmm, my grade for the mid-unit hasn't come out yet, I think she might not put up anyone's until she's done grading all of them though. We proceeded to answer some R&D questions, surprisingly there was only 5 today in total so I finished those quite quickly. Finally, we ended the class by writing a quick write.

Next class is Spanish. Oh my, I don't seem to remember what exactly we did in Spanish. AHH yes, the teacher started by presenting a short story to us which we had to interpret ourselves and write out what we thought the lesson was. To be frank, I didn't quite understand what exactly the story was about so I translated the whole thing into English... Anyways, after reading the story the morale was really evident. It's actually used in a lot of fables, Value what you have or you might end up losing it if you become greedy. Then we did a comparison on essays and stories, what's the difference in their purposes and their style. mhm, essays are usually real subjective and demonstrate the writer's opinion on a topic while stories are generally meant for entertainment and to teach a lesson through a series of events. There were a few more points but I'm not going to go into detail as I'm already going past my time limit. 

OH and then was HISTORYYY. As we went in the teacher told us presentations were today. OH NO, it was terrible. I was planning on rehearsing and going over the order before the official presentation but I didn't think that it was going to be today. So I went headfirst into the presentation. 

My part went quite smooth at least, I had the whole script written out beforehand thankfully so I didn't need to improvise all that much. This really helped too as when we got to the topic of Political Status my teammates didn't say anything so I just kept going with my script. But for some reason, when M started to talk I realized that he wasn't going according to the script. Then it hit me. I FORGOT TO TELL ABOUT THE SCRIPT. 

Dang it, but it was too late to tell him already. That means that I wrote all that for nothing. The whole structure of the presentation basically fell apart after it was no longer my turn. I can't believe that I forgot to tell them. After the presentation, I confirmed with the teacher once more that she had received my dad's email on excusing me for her next class. BUT GUESS WHAT HAD TO HAPPEN. She told me the debate was the next class. are you kidding me? That's actually hilarious. 

I mean she told me I was exempt from it which entails that it won't cost me any points however I feel like my team would be in shambles if I left. I did do nearly all of the research and work after all. They know nothing about my topic. How will they manage the debate? What's more is that none of them have had experience in debate before, at least, not that I know of. 

I sure wish the very best of luck to them. But for now, I've got my own stuff to worry about. I'll be going to sleep now, bonne nuit tout le monde. 

Strategy

Imagine yourself heading into a whole new world, thrilling yet terrifying. How would yOu feel if you came to an unfamiliar planet?  

You know I've been asking myself whether I should write Good morning or Good night when I start off my blog. Some people read it the next day in the morning, but some people read it right before going to bed. Hmm, I'm really not sure. So for the past few posts, I've just been saying Hello or Hey in many different languages LOL. And then, I'm not sure good night is the right thing to say as you're starting to write because usually, that's when someone's about to sleep. But then, what else would I say? I don't quite have an answer for that yet. 

I reviewed some stuff today but I didn't take it TOO intensely because pushing yourself too hard before a big test isn't always a good thing. Just make sure that I still remember everything that I've learned and that I know when & how to apply them. 

Mostly, on the three problems given to us in one day I would be focusing on the first one. Try to do the first problem completely before moving on to the others since problems 2 and 3 are both more complicated. 

However, if I'm really confident in my solution for #1 then I should look at the other problems and attempt to write down things that I notice. If what I write down is relevant to the solution itself then they would give me partial points which is great. Basically out of the two days, I try to focus on one problem each day and get some partial points. This strategy should maximize my total score. 

Oh my, only a measly 10 minutes left till 11 PM. I still haven't showered yet either. AND to top it all off my phone was already taken away for today so if I still can't sleep on time the next day then she'll keep it taken for 48 hours. and WE CAN'T HAVE THAT. So I must finish on-time today. 

Um oh yeah I played some chess today. It's been a while since I've played so I'm a bit rusty. Oh and I've also been slowing down to think about moves which lead me to lose two games that I could've easily won, due to my time being finished. Sigh, gotta move faster. OKIE then I'll go shower now. Adios!

 simple day

Hey, what's up everyone! Today seemed to go by pretty smoothly.

In the morning I ate some sausages from Costco LOL, tbh they're not bad. 

When you first taste it, it gives off a tiny hint of spiciness but then it subsides rather quickly so I'm not sure if they count as spicy sausages. Before I couldn't take spice AT ALL, but after years of practicing, I can handle quite a bit of spice now. I mean it's probably best if there's a large glass of water around that I can gulp down in case it's more than I can take but at least I'm not afraid of eating it anymore. 

Oh and then at 1 o'clock I had my last training session for Math Olympics before my CENTRO competition. 

Hmm, today we focused on integer polynomials. To test for irreducibility you can use this theorem called Eisenhower's Criterion. Sounds like a pretty fancy name. Anyways, we applied this to a couple problems and also looked at a few other problems using Vieta's formula. This formula basically connects the coefficients of the polynomial with the roots or solutions of it. That's the main idea behind Vieta's formula. 

Personally, I think the class is quite difficult and hard to follow along but maybe that's because I don't know enough of this stuff yet and a lot of it is new to me. There are kids in this class who are in 11th or 12th grade and technically I'm participating in this competition as an 8th grader so there's a pretty large gap there. I should be able to follow along next year though. 

And then after the class, I rested a little while and then reviewed all the most used concepts that have the largest chance of appearing in the actual competition. Later on, we went to pick up my mom from work! The sky wasn't particularly pretty today. Clouds weren't as clear either. Just a smooth yet simple sky. Kinda like my day today. 

Well, I'm going to stop my blog here for the day. And I already know that my phone's gone for tomorrow sigh, oh well I guess I'll have to manage without it. cya

 

movies vs. books

Mhm it's real late now. Usually, I'd be finishing my blog at this time but today I've only just started. 

My mom had me watch two episodes of this new series she's watching and she bet that I would cry watching it. Btw, I do not cry in movies. HOWEVER, I have somehow cried while reading books. 

I guess it's because in movies all you do is sit there and watch the actors and the scenery do the work. But in books, your own imagination comes into play. So I think, my own imagination just moves me more than any movie can. 

Hmm, let's see I didn't have any class today so I mostly spent to morning working on the PPT of our politics presentation. Yeah, it still wasn't done yet because the outline took real long, and then the PPT needs to be based on the outline so I needed to finish that part first before doing the PowerPoint. 

Anyways, I managed to finish off and submit the PowerPoint and the outline two hours before the due time which is great. I sure added quite a lot of stuff to it. Hmm, I think there were only 5 slides when I started editing which was mostly comprised of the paragraphs of information my teammates piled onto slides sighh. So I worked my magic! 

In the end, I turned it in with 17 slides in total, I think the whole structure is also pretty clear so that's a win for me. Oh and my teammates also wrote to me afterward thanking me for basically carrying the whole team LOL. Well, I guess it's sorta true. 

I probably took on 85% of the work for this part of the project. Eh I'm fine with it, it sure would've been nice if they could've helped out just a bit more but they already passed my own expectations for them so I'm not going to complain. I'm glad it all worked out in the end. 

Ah and then the rest of the day I focused on math for quite a lot of it. After all, the competition is right around the corner. I'll be going to sleep now guys, good night! 

PPT skills ftw

Hi everyone! I hope everybody's going great on this magnificent day. 

In Physics I was pretty confident going into the quiz on momentum. However, I was dumb on one of the problems where I mistook impulse for impact force. oof, I should've reviewed the terms a bit more thoroughly. 

Anyways, with one question wrong, I already have an 8/10 since the whole quiz was only 5 questions. BUT, we proceeded to do a lab, and guess what. I got paired with Dino again! LOLLL so with Dino helping me out occasionally we got an easy 100% again cuz I'm just that cool. My grade is saved. 

In PE, oh my I was really surprised in this class today. Do you still remember those presentations we prepared last class? Well, we presented them in front of the class this day. My group was the third group which just so happens to be my lucky number... 

AND right after we finished presenting the teacher started smiling and said, "This is what I wanted. I wish I could use you guys as an example for all my other groups. This group did everything great. This is work that is worth 50 points." 

I instantly felt so relieved. Looks like my PowerPoint skills are really showing now LOLLL. 

The teacher keeps stressing on the whole group to not write so much on one slide. And then the first content slide of the group after me starts with a huge paragraph. oh my goodness, you don't have to write everything you're going to say on the slideeeee. The slide is just visual support for the audience. Yet, the kids are having a real hard time changing their PPT's to match what the teacher wants. 

Thankfully, I knew the people in my group well enough that they let me edit the slides and the whole format. I pared down our own little paragraph to a couple bullet points and added pictures, designs, embellished the presentation a little bit. But at the same time not too much, or else it might appear garish. That went amazingly well in the end, so I'm really happy about that. 

For math, we started off the class with an in-class assessment. It was just factoring so I'm fairly sure that I aced it LOL. He gave us like 30 minutes when I only really used 7 minutes so I just took the rest of that time and turned it into piano practice haha. Oh and then after that we started doing some new problems but didn't go too far into it before class ended. sigh, oh well that's it for school. 

Adios! I gotta go shower now. cyaaa

 Paradigm Teammate

As you might have read from the title of today's post, paradigm is actually a word I just learned today. You say out the last part as dime, like the coin instead of dig with an m at the end. Like digum. Yea, it's not paradigum, it's paradime. So it basically means model, like the model student. What you want to be like. Therefore, paradigm teammate means model teammate. haha so why did I make that my title? 

I was prepared to dedicate the entire day to my project. And I did. I practically spent 6-7 hours on this thing today. Thankfully, I finished. Or I probably wouldn't be writing this blog now. Ahem, so let me tell you my story. 

A couple days before I had already prescheduled a meeting with my group to meet at 1 PM Wednesday and then I also arranged a meeting with Psi and Toro at 11 AM the same day. I woke up at 8 so I had three hours left till the first meeting. 

My dad said, Hey! Since you decided to cancel the fun trip today then at least come with us to go grocery shopping! I said sure. So we walked to SuperMax and back just in time to meet Toro and Psi.

The thing with working with close friends is, it's too easy to get sidetracked. So out of the hour and a half, we were in that google meet I think the actual working time was only around 30 min if not less. Then I had to ask them to leave cuz my own group was going to be coming soon. 

Great thing is that they both showed up, and ahead of time too! We worked ok for the first two hours. I mean every 5 minutes one of them would ask me if what they were doing was ok even though there were no group leaders LOL. 

oh my goodness, my writing is becoming real monotone real fast. I guess that's because I've barely done any creative thinking today. Researching and formatting an outline doesn't really require any creativity. 

Hmm, you know what I doubt that my two teammates are going to be reading this blog so I'll talk about them. I will name them M and D. As in medical doctor. IDK it's completely random. So, almost three hours into our work M couldn't really take it anymore. He said, "We've been in this for nearly three hours already. I want to go." So I replied, "Sure you can go if you think you're all done. I should be able to finish up the rest in 3 more hours." And M left. 

btw he finished like 1/3 of his part and I did the rest. Surprisingly D stayed with me for almost another hour. We always used to think of her as part of the popular group and extremely unreliable but it seems that we just never really got to talk to her at all. 

Anyway, she did more than my expectations so I'm happy about that. Of course, I still helped with part of hers as well tho LOL. Hmm, then our supposed "shared" topic... Yeah, well turns out there was an unspoken agreement that the shared topic became Jerry's topic. In the end, I finished my own topic, the shared topic, most of M's topic, and a quarter of D's topic. Sigh. I mean I was expecting to solo this project ever since I saw the groups but it turned out to be more work than I had anticipated. 

They better be thankful that there's a group grade so I need to do their part in order to save my own grade. This is the bad part about group projects. It really depends very very heavily on your group.  

Nevertheless, I think the final draft of the outline turned out quite good. After all, it's Jerry who's writing it. MUAHAAHAHA GOOD NIGHT MY FRIENDS! stay cool. 

impulse = momentum

And here we are. 11:25 PM. Today I get to sleep at 12 since I don't have school tomorrow. 

Physics is the same as always. A whole new lesson, a whole new PowerPoint. Today's class was on momentum. Momentum is equal to mass times change in velocity. And then impulse equals force times time. However, momentum equals impulse. 

So mass times change in velocity = force times time. That's basically the main equation we used for the whole class today. It's a bit hard to wrap your head around at first but once you get the hang of it most of the problems should be no problemo. 

In PE we had the whole class to work on a PowerPoint presentation that's going to be worth 50 whole points. I think we have this one in the bag. My group is pretty good too. I have Fox, my Model UN co-delegate, and another friend of mine all in the same group. 

Haha, what's really funny though was that even in PE my close friend group was the quickest to get picked. Literally, Psi, Rama, and I were picked one after another by the four assigned "captains" of each team. LOLL even though that means all of us got separated it was still a good feeling at the time. 

Finally, in Algebra II we did MORE factoring! This time when he gave us a Jamboard link filled with problems I no longer simply waited for him to slowly go through each problem. I just started powering through the problems, like 20 seconds a problem. Then after 3 or 4 problems, Rama joined in and together we finished all of the problems before the teacher even finished explaining the very first one. 

However, when he finished explaining the first two problems and he moved on to the next problem... He saw my very quick process along with the answer. And then he looked at the rest and was very surprised that all of them were already done LOL. He was like, "Well I guess I don't need to explain anymore since someone decided to run over all the problems." oof. I should've seen that one coming actually. For some reason, the math teacher at my school doesn't like the kids that are faster. 

Back in Algebra I, whenever the teacher asked a question I would raise my hand along with Rama and Fox usually but then even if the only people that raised their hands were one of us she would say, "Anyone else?" I know, very infuriating. Hmm, I never even got to know why. Maybe I'll figure it out someday when I grow up. 

OH NO, only 5 minutes left. cya!

 The penguin and the polar bear

HIII it's Jerry here again posting for the 172nd time since the very start of this blog. Oh my, what a journey it's been huh. I wonder sometimes, if I continue this, by the time I have gotten to college it'll be well over 1000 posts. Ah, the nostalgia I'll have when I look back on these days. Actually, will I ever read the entire thing? I'm very sure that it'll be much larger than a textbook by that time if I were to print it all out. sighh, enough worrying about the future. 

The first thing in English was teaching us how to submit the Mid-Unit through this website called Turnitin. It basically takes your work and cross-checks it with everything the internet and school databases have to offer to make sure your writing isn't plagiarized from somewhere else. Oh it also has a grading system to facilitate the teacher's grading process. Hmm, I hope I do good on it. We then did some reading and discussion questions which I sadly did not finish. And finally, a quick write based on a specific excerpt in the story. 

OHH and then we have Spanish! This might've been the best class of the day. The teacher gave us 20 minutes to write out a full-on fable that represents a valuable lesson with our partner of choice. Ah, it wasn't an easy task but Rama and I managed to come up with a pretty nice one considering the time limit. We worked on discord LOL, I wrote the sentences and sent them into the chat while he copied them into his so that he had the whole thing. 

Then we fixed the errors and changed some minor parts and ta-da! We're done! The penguin and the polar bear. That's the title of the fable. And yes, I know that polar bears live in the Arctic and penguins do not and that they could technically never meet each other if humans didn't stick them both in a zoo. However, it's a fable so we thought we could get away with it if no one noticed heh heh 

The story goes like this, 

One day a penguin was about to go fishing. All the other penguins in his group only fished a couple at a time and ate the fish immediately, but this way, the penguins needed to go fishing at every mealtime. Suddenly, the penguin has a marvelous idea. He could fish for more fish than he usually eats in one go! This way he thought he would stay full until the next day and not have to go fishing again that day. So he fished until he had a whole pile of fish and slowly ate them all. 

Then on the other side, a polar bear wanders around in search of his next meal. He's been having trouble finding anything to eat lately so he was famished. He then sees the penguin laying on the ground and so his eyes light up. As he rushes over to eat the penguin the penguin sees him and tries to flee. However, he was still too full from the fish to run properly so the polar bear caught up to him rather quickly. In the end, the penguin was eaten by the polar bear. 

The lesson of this story is: Don't bite off more than you can chew. 

haha not bad right? And we had to write it in 20 minutes IN SPANISH. Yeah, quite a feat if you ask me. OH there's only a measly ten minutes left until my phone is gone.

AHHH ok so in History we had the whole class to work on the information outline of our research along with our presentation. For my group we decided to do a PPT for the presentation however my teammates don't seem to have sufficient information. 

Thus, I think I might have to sacrifice my free day on Wednesday to work on it. I also scheduled this with my team, 1:00 PM on Wednesday we're gonna finish this thing. I purposefully put it at 1 PM so that we have enough time to finish. I can go till 8 PM if it really gets to that. 7 whole hours. That should be more than enough if my team is also there working alongside me. UMM, I DONT HAVE ENOUGH TIMEEE I think that's pretty much it for school so BYEEE

humdrum

Today was pretty plain. Nothing too interesting happened. 

I did quite a lot of math today though. Euler's totient function, Fermat's little theorem, diophantine equations, just a review on number theory basically. I don't have enough time to study enough geometry that'll actually be useful enough in the competition so I decided to hone my number theory ability better instead. 

Hmm, tomorrow is a Monday so school is starting again, thankfully on Wednesday they're giving us the day off due to Parent-Teacher conferences and I think my parents aren't planning on going. 

Apparently, they say that the teachers tell them the same thing every year so there's not even a point in going anymore. I also think that my parents said we might leave the house on Wednesday and go somewhere, you know, just leave the house every once in a while.

OH and then finally tomorrow in English I should get to submit my Mid-Unit finally. Ah, at last I will get to turn it in after just having it there for so long. 

And I don't have any more time left sigh, I'll leave it here today. SO SHORT. Maybe I'll write it longer than usual tomorrow to make up for today's LOL. cya!

Home Sweet Home

Hello! Today was a pretty chill day. 

Early in the morning, I took my CENTRO training class. 

Oh but a little bit before that we were asked to join another google meet so that we could record this short little video. I guess they are planning on playing it during the opening ceremony. 

They just asked that we all said, "Soy Jerry de Puerto Rico!", or something like that so only about 2 seconds per person. The whole video needed to be within 15 seconds. Anyways right after that, I went into the zoom class and today's class was all pretty confusing since it was all new. Spiral similarity problems, apparently it's seen a lot in olympiad problems but I've never learned it before so it was really difficult. 

Hmm, after the class I did some typing on Nitrotype. It's been a while since I last played on that website but it seems like my typing skills never decreased at all. Actually, it's the opposite! 

I think that I type with more ease now than before, I typed over 100 WPM today at least 5 times. I still remember how proud I was when I wrote that blog announcing that I had just passed 100 for the very first time. Well now, it's become a whole lot easier.  

Following that I practiced some piano, playing Chopin's Waltz in A Minor. I believe I'm still on the first page but I'm making steady progress. However, after a while of playing, I started feeling a bit drowsy. Maybe because it's been quite a week. 

So I took a nap that lasted around an hour thirty. When I woke up my dad was calling me to go pick up mom from work with him. 

She had a good day today, there are a lot more people now that the government allowed 55% of people in stores. Mom was in a good mood too so she wanted to find a place to eat for tonight. We went to two restaurants, in the first one they were still only doing take-out and my mom didn't want to eat take-out so we moved on. And then in the second one there was a waiting list that was estimated to last for at least half an hour and she was hungry. Ultimately, we just decided to go back home after all LOL. Nothing like home sweet home right? 

Haha, today's blog is nice and short. Kinda like what yesterday's was supposed to look like but then, I got a bit carried away with writing out everything that came to mind that I no longer took into consideration the length of it. 

Mhm, well I guess I'll get going now. BYEEE

im going to keep it short COUGH COUGH

I'm going to keep it short today. Actually it's really late right now so I'm just going to speed through the main highlights for today. 

For English, we still haven't turned in the assessment, now she turned the official due date to Monday. Then she also announced that we might not have any Membean quizzes and instead just try to use the new vocabulary we learn in writing. 

This helps me out a lot, after all I always thought that the Membean quizzes were a bit unfair since it was based on how hard your words on. If everyone were given questions based on the same words then I would have been just fine but instead people get tested on what an objective is while I get words that I've never ever seen before like preponderance and acquiesce. 

However, she said that she was still discussing it with the rest of the English department so it's not final. Let's just hope for the best.

In Spanish we had to choose a lesson from one of the fables that were presented in class and then proceed to writing about one of your own experiences where this lesson could be applied or seen. Then we chose partners for the next project we're going to do which if I'm not mistaken is write out a fable of our own and voice out the story in front of the class. 

I got to pick Rama and although he's not the very best at Spanish he has quite the imagination so I will need that when we have to come up with an interesting plot. Then, I believe that he should have little to no problem voicing out the character since I don't think he's nervous around people that he knows. 

Finally we have History. For today the whole class was dedicated to working with your groups on the politics project. The whole thing is due next Friday so maybe I'll do part of it on the weekend. 

The good thing is I managed to get my group talking finally and I think that the other members are finally starting to get more comfortable around each other which is absolutely indispensable in any team project. 

Ahem, then we get to the not so happy part. Dad called me to do some math. There was one rule on this problem that I didn't remember clearly so I used an incorrect method which of course lead to a wrong answer. 

Then, my dad got really angry and said I wasn't paying enough attention in class or else and I quote, "with your intelligence, you can do so many things. But you waste too much time on stocks, I absolutely REGRET ever making you a stock account..." My mom interrupted for me and said that I wasn't overspending time on stocks and that he was overreacting about it. 

He continued, in a louder voice, "Then social media. You waste too much time on social media. You could be doing something productive with all that time." wow, I mean I can see where he's coming from but still I think that keeping in touch with friends in definitely important. He might not know that because back then social media wasn't a thing and he never really got the hang of it even after it came out. 

Now, straight to the main point. I'm facing a dilemma right now. Do I use a lot more time on math, something I have not that much interest in but is very important OR, do I stop? 

Stop doing competitive math, stop having to spend so much effort on it, stop getting into terrible schisms with my family. Why is math literally tearing apart my relationship with my dad? Why? Isn't the point in learning math to "get into a good college and a good job"? 

But what's the point in having a degree that was traded through sweat and tears along with an empty job that I don't like? We only live once. What does "Live your life to fullest." really entail? Anyways, I got frustrated and mad at my dad and until now, I still haven't said a single word to him since the argument. 

I went into my room and saw my phone light up with a message from Canary. She wrote me yet another poem, this one wishing me luck on the competition that's coming up. Wishing that I'm happy. wow. What am I supposed to do now? I can't just give up like this. Looks like I'm gonna have to keep on fighting with my dad sighh. I'll solve all the dumb math problems LOL. 

Ultimately, I am honestly just so SOO grateful to have ever gotten the chance to meet you Canary. If it weren't for your jocund encouraging words I'd probably still be in a very bad mood right now. so thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!

oh my, it's almost 1 AM. looks like my plans on waking up early on Saturday are going in the scrapper. Hasta luego mis amigos, boa noite. 

if i had a tail

Heyyyy how's it going everyone! 

You know there was a time where every day I would go into my class and since I'm usually there one or two minutes earlier than the actual class the room would be empty except for the teacher and me. 

Usually, this is when the teacher says, "Hi! How are you, Jerry?" And then I would be rather startled but it's the teacher so I needed to respond something right? "I'm doing good, how about you?" "Good, good." And then the attempt at a conversation dies there. Sigh, so as you can see I really needed to come up with a better response than the boring old, "I'm good." "Fine." "Great, how about you?" 

Anyway, I decided to look for some more quality responses to this very common question. Google aided me with 150+ Funny Ways to Respond to the Question "How are you? and of course, I clicked on it, and woah, there were actually so many good ones. You can search it up too and pick out a few of your favorites to try out. Moving on, the first class of the day was Physics.

Today's Physics class was pretty ordinary. We had to take notes on a PowerPoint about Newton's Third Law and yes, I know that we are moving way faster than the other groups that aren't Honors but I feel like this might not turn out to be a vantage. 

Actually, I believe that we are doing fewer practice problems than the regular groups and thus we are not learning in-depth about these topics. Merely scratching the surface. 

I mean the other groups are still on projectile motion and that was like two weeks ago for us. Is moving this fast actually a good thing though? I feel like if we get tested on previous knowledge we'll draw a blank since we don't remember them anymore due to the lack of application of the concepts. However, for now, my grade is looking good so I'm not going to complain that much. 

For Music, the teacher's power was apparently out and he had no other way to connect so we missed another class :(

I took the time to look at some pieces that I thought were cool. There are a couple jazz ones but since I've only ever played classical before, I'm wondering how complex a jazz song I can manage. I did find a google document with some arrangements though, so I think that'll suffice for the time being. 

Hmm, next was PE. So, as I first entered the class I was met with a golden opportunity. The teacher customarily asked, "How are you doing Jerry!" and I responded "Great! If I had a tail I would be wagging it right now!" She was puzzled. Sigh, I guess I should've seen it coming. 

People aren't expecting a fun answer. They just do it as a formality. Ah, so sad. That was one of my favorite ones too and I wasted it as the other person didn't even understand it. Jeez. 

Well if you're going to try some out I sure hope that the same thing doesn't happen to you. But it was a tragedy I tell you. Complete tragedy. 

I ended up having to explain the whole thing to her with her looking at me weird instead of her laughing and praising me which was what the plan was. oof, anyways, in class we first went into groups to make a PowerPoint on how we manage stress. 

Personally, I think that this is a bit a sensitive topic for some people. Rama seemed to have no problem with it though, when he was presenting he said, "I can't manage something I don't get." LOLLL well little Rama's all grown up now. What's next? World domination? Conquest of Mars? I'm sure you'll come up with something Rama. 

Oh right, we also did a workout but it wasn't fun so I'm not going to write anything on it. 

Finally, MATHHH. 

This class was even more tragedic. We literally spent the whole class on two pages of the textbook because "troubled students" had lots of questions and doubts that were obvious. Our teacher is really nice so he took the time to explain each and every single question, trying to rid all the students of their qualms before the in-class assessment. 

They had the actual nerve to ask, "What does the degree of a function do?" three times. THREE TIMES!!! The same flipping question. They were just stalling time at that point and so the entire class went by without learning anything new. Just great. 

This is the bad thing about sharing a class with "troubled students". And if you noticed the quotation marks, that's because I'm completely sure that they know exactly what the answer is, they were just doing that to take off time from the class. ah, maybe I can discuss with the teacher on how to obviate this problem later on. 

Well, I'm running out of time so cya!

boom three wins in a row

Today was actually really fun! wow, that opening is so bland. HMM, how would I add some color into that? Bonjour mon amis! Ah, much better. 

Finally, today was the Mid-Unit Assessment for English! I have to say, it was a teeny tiny bit less intense than what I was expecting. 

She took like 20 minutes away at the start explaining exactly how we were going to be writing it and then during it, she was also giving comments out loud so the other students were able to hear every word she said. That caused a tiny bit of distraction but it's fine because she gave us until Friday to submit. 

Anyway, I think I got this one in the bag. The teacher first helped me fix a run-on sentence, Toro and Psi read it and added one word, and then finally Canary helped me formulate a great concluding sentence. Ah, after this many rounds of quality reviews I'm confident in my final draft. 

Oh and then another girl from my class asked me to peer review hers (btw the teacher encouraged us to peer review with people that we trust) so I'll give her some advice on hers because it needs a bit of revision before handing in. 

OH, I almost forgot, I even included a part of a quote that I showed here in one of the previous posts. It's the moment to memory one. AHH and then I EVEN GOT TO USE ALBEIT! I'm such a god. That should sum it up for English, next, we got Spanishhh. 

The presentation went pretty smoothly, I had rehearsed it before to make sure my speech flows and it sure paid off. I believe my group took the least time in finishing. 

All the other groups took a lot more time than us because there were multiple errors in either content or format, and our Spanish teacher always corrects them on the spot so that took a whole lot of time. The remaining presentations took the rest of the class and we're still missing two more presentations that we'll be finishing on Friday. 

Ultimately, we have History! Today's class was unusually eventful. We were first divided into groups, four groups in total, and we needed to make Kahoots! In case you don't know what Kahoot is, it's basically this website where you can make quizzes that multiple people can play at once, and then at the end it'll show who got first, second and third place! Woah, I feel like I'm advertising for them lol. 

They decide who gets a higher rank based on how quick and how accurate they were in answering the questions. I think we made our Kahoot pretty original, most questions did not appear on the other Kahoots made. Oh right, we were making the questions on the first three chapters of the textbook that we had already covered in class. SO, we finally got to play them! 

And guess what, besides our own Kahoot which the teacher didn't allow us to play since we know all the answers, on the other three Kahoots. GUESS WHO GOT FIRST PLACE ON ALL THREE? THAT'S RIGHT. JERRYYYYY!! boom. Good game everyone, it was a good run. You might've had a chance if Jerry wasn't playing with you. LOLLL ok the point is, I'm proud of those three victories. 

OH NO ONLY FIVE MINUTES LEFT!! ADIOSSSSSSSS

 Apple Event!

I'm struggling with what to write. I mean could write about my school day but then, I think it gets a bit repetitive doesn't it? Thus, I have decided to write about my day.

In the morning, just 10 minutes before Physics, my electricity went out. lol, what a start. So I got through the class with the generator, luckily the Wi-Fi was working when we plugged it in so I didn't need to resort to a hotspot. Anyway, in this class, we did a lab on Atwood's machine. We were divided into groups and I got Dino in my group along with another friend of mine. 

OH, time for a name? I shall name this friend, Amar. So, the group was just me, Dino, and Amar. 

We were also assigned roles in the group by the teacher, it just so happens that I was in charge of submitting the final thing so I was ALSO in charge of all the writing! YAY! And of course, we got a perfect grade. lol 

Ah right, earlier in the morning my music teacher sent me a message saying that he had a certain situation that prevented him from giving me class today. In other words, I had a free period! haha yayy so I researched some companies that I was interested in, Zoom, Apple, you know the blue-chip stocks. OHH, also there was an Apple event today!! 

They announced four new products I think, the HomePod Mini, the iPhone 12, the iPhone 12 Mini, and the MagSafe. You can look at it later on if you're interested. Basically, the phones will be running with 5G now and there's also some other features like a ceramic shield, A14 Bionic chip that's supposed to make this iPhone the fastest smartphone there is, and some other stuff. As for the HomePod, it's like an Alexa but with Siri lol, it's specialized for playing music if I remember correctly... And then the Magsafe magnets are for charging and accessories. 

Hmm, but for some strange reason, the stock price actually dropped rather than rising. I have yet to figure out why, but anyways it was a great day for stocks, especially Zoom. It was up by 5% at market close. 

In PE we learned about Tabata sprints and its origin, history, all that. Then we were once again divided into groups and sent to make our own Tabata routine of six exercises varying in areas of fitness. We made this pretty, embellished PowerPoint, and in the end, we didn't even get to present it properly due to lack of time. Ah, at least the teacher is going to see it because we needed to send it to her for a grade. 

And then math was just math. We did factoring, learned what multiplicities are, did more problems. Yeah, that's it. Adios guys, there's very little time left. 

 Happy Columbus Day

Olá! I believe that's Portuguese. 

Many often think that Columbus actually discovered America but that's actually a misconception. He did in fact, discover Puerto Rico in 1493. LOL anyways I guess that's why my school gave us the day off today while some other schools in the US still opened. 

Good thing the stock market was open today. I made 1% back today, great gains thanks to the stimulus package.

Tonight my long weekend comes to an end. In retrospect, it really didn't seem at that long at all huh. Then again, tomorrow my week starts. At least, it's only four days this time, and maybe three and a half since Fridays are basically always half-days. 

Let's see, I have Physics, Music, PE, and Algebra tomorrow. Final check on due dates. Hmm, nothing seems to pop up. But then... 

On Wednesday I have English, Spanish, and History. OOF. English, we're probably going to have to take the Mid-Unit Assessment, and although I've looked at the prompt and everything for quite a while now it still gets me a bit nervous thinking about it. Then in Spanish, I have that presentation that I never got over, but with that confidence boost from last class, I might just be able to power through it. In History, we're most likely going to do a lot of work on research. 

AHH well, research is ok as long as we get enough time. So you see, tomorrow shouldn't be that hard. It's the day after tomorrow where things should really start getting intense. And then, they sent out briefings for Model UN so I need to start writing my position paper with my co-delegate soon too. Ah, so much stuff to do. 

My friends on the other hand are just spamming in the chat, arguing over which pick-up lines would work the best. 

Well, today I worked on some geometry problems because that's where I'm lacking the most. Plus, it shows up on CENTRO exams a lot. In the 6 problems, there are guaranteed 1 geometry problem, if not two. 

Oh yeah, I've also been watching this really good series on Youtube, it shows the difficulties and struggles an investor at a big investment company has to go through to get to the top. It lets the audience see a myriad of complex relations between characters and how every character has their own thoughts, their own reasons for their actions. 

Oops, I forgot the name of the series in English, it's in Chinese so I'll leave it here in case you're interested. It's called: 平凡的荣耀. Search that up on YouTube and I'm sure you'll get a hit. 

Well, I'll get going now, there are only 10 minutes left. Bon nuit mon amis!

 weekend opinion

No one wants to work. No one wants to work on a weekend. No one. 

.........

At least, that's what everyone says. The truth is, people, do indeed work on weekends. Why? Everyone has their reasons. 

Whether it's to study, prepare, or simply to gain an upper hand on something. Everyone, everyone who wants to become better works on weekends. Because on weekends people tend to relax, they play, they do something other than work. And precisely at that time, someone else is working, working to become better, working to surpass you, working to stand taller than you. 

Now, this might not always be the case. It's perfectly fine to take a break on a weekend too. Just know that this break is just a break, you have GOT to continue after it. Don't let one break become a stop. 

I guess life is more of a process. An unfinished masterpiece. I'll leave it short and simple today. 

 Quote Exhibition

Today, today was a growing day. Quote-wise I think every quote is a summary, an analysis of what the person saying it went through. I read a lot of these summaries today. However, I believe that not all of these are 100% correct if used at the wrong time. 

Timing is essential. Time is of the essence. As you see, there are various different ways to convey the same meaning. But which way is the most correct? Which way is best? Which way can allow the other person to understand it fully? 

That is the skill to express yourself. It might be ignored, neglected, or overlooked sometimes but it is still a skill that is lacking in many many people. Now, ready for the quote exhibit?

"If you can't do great things, do small things in a great way." -Napoleon Hill

"Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory." -Theodor Seuss Geisel

"You will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor." -Aristotle

"The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." -Lao Tzu

These are all classics, but it's also not good to just be a quote dispenser. So, try not to just spit out quotes at every moment. It can be really annoying sometimes. Have some of your own opinions. 

Well, my original plan was to give my opinion on these quotes, but now I think it's better for you to think these out without another's opinion. Have fun, cyaaa

 haha highlights and happy birthdayyy!!

Today was quite a fruitful day. Is fruitful a word? I'm guessing it is LOL 

First of all, it's my father's birthday. SO HAPPY BIRTHDAY DAD!! 

For school, today was a great day too! In Physics we took a quiz on Newton's second law of motion. And well, I was really proud when the teacher announced that I was the first one to get a perfect on it. LETS GOOOO! 

Following that in Music, they didn't have enough time for me to play since they were figuring out how to work this website called Bandlab where we're supposed to combine all the audios into one. Hmm, it's quite an interesting program perhaps I'll look at it later on for personal use. 

Ok next class we have PE! Today's workout was relatively simple, a few full-body stretches and a couple exercises that weren't all that intense, and we're done. 

In Algebra, we worked on some workbook problems on finding triples and found a proof of the Pythagorean Theorem which was apparently first proven by a former President of the US back when he was a congressman. Impressive. And the proof itself is pretty neat too. 

Next, we had English, and in this class, we once again went over what the Mid-Unit was going to be about and how she was going to grade us on it. It'll be on Monday, a paragraph of no longer than 8 sentences and it's going to be worth a full 50 points. That's a big grade for English considering that she doesn't give out many grades in the first place. I can't afford to do badly on this. 

Plus, I already know for certain that Membean quizzes are going to give me a hard time as well. If you think about it the system really isn't that fair. 

The more time you use Membean the more words you'll get. The more words you get the harder they'll become. The harder your words are, the harder the quizzes will be. The harder the quizzes get, the harder it will be to get a good grade. And that's the infinite loop. 

That's why so many of my classmates still get words like conversation. I mean, there's no way they could get that wrong on a quiz, hence it's kinda a guaranteed 100% every quiz. 

The more quizzes there are the higher their grade will get boosted. The only problem is, they're not learning anything. And on the SAT you'll need to know the meanings of these words, if not you'll probably flunk the reading comprehension questions and basically the entire English section of the SAT. And mind you, the SAT is only made up of English and Math so doing terrible on one is already awful enough that you'll probably need a retake. See the conflict? Yeah, maybe I'll discuss it with the teacher sometime and ask for her opinion on it. 

Moving on I had the class I was most nervous about today. Spanish. 

I thought that I was going to be presenting my PowerPoint but at the start of class she asked us, "Did we finish presenting all the PowerPoints last class?" And of course, the class answered no, then she said "OK, well we won't be doing those today." Oh my goodness. I was so relieved at that moment, however, there's a catch. We were going to be watching this video about a fable and we needed to find out the moral or lesson the author is trying to convey to the audience. 

It was titled, "The black sheep". 

Once upon a time in a galaxy far far away lived a herd of sheep and within that herd of sheep, there was one black sheep. He was shot and killed. Then they regretted their decision and dedicated a statue for him in the park. For later years to come every time, a black sheep would appear, they would be killed. And boom, that's the end of the story. 

So, what's the lesson here? That's a great question. One that the students before me had not reached the answer to. We needed to say the right lesson to the story in order to be dismissed from the class. 

Anyways I was the fourth or fifth the teacher called on to read out what we thought the lesson of the story was and all the kids before me were had failed so I was a bit nervous too but this is what I said: "Sometimes we don't realize the value of something until we lose it.". Albeit this is quite a well-known lesson I believe that there are moments where people may forget about it and take certain things for granted. 

Nevertheless, I was flooded with euphoria as she said, "Very well. You are dismissed. Have a good weekend." BOOOOOOM so I just left the google meet with a large grin on my face. Later Rama informed me that after I left kids just copied what I said and got dismissed themselves. LOL that was definitely a highlight of the day. 

Then finally in History, we were just given some time to take research notes on the topic that we were assigned for the political project. We met in breakout rooms but we didn't really discuss all that much, I guess everyone simply wanted the class to be over so they could start their weekend. 

Ah right I forgot to say that apparently, we have Monday off which makes it a LONG WEEKEND!!!! YAY! And to top it all off today was a good day for my stocks as well, we finished off at 188 dollars positive. We're doing awesome ladies and gentlemen. Let's keep it up. GOOD NIGHT! 

 PE rapport!

What if everyone in the world had the power to communicate with their pet? Woah, well wouldn't that be a sight to behold. 

Imagine if your pet just casually having a conversation with you about their favorite treats as you are giving them a bath LOL 

Come to think of it, it might help a lot of people improve their communication skills because usually in a family you can't talk much to a specific person the same age as you. The only people would be your classmates or friends but sometimes there are things that they just can't understand right? Then your pet would be a great choice. 

Now, should all people be able to communicate with pets even if they weren't their rightful owner? In that case, we would be able to talk to every single animal since they can all be pets right? Maybe. That's a thought to think over. 

Coming back to my schoolday, the first class was Physics. We did a slower review of Newton's second law and then we were assigned practice problems from the textbook as homework if we didn't finish during class.

Next in Music, I was given the chords to the song at the start of class so I spent most of the time working on those and I also showed the other pieces that I had been practicing to the teacher since I think I'm going to have to play in front the class tomorrow. 

Today's PE class was pretty interesting. The teacher first asked us to name out who we interact with the least within the class and then after everyone was done she paired people up so that those who claim to have the least interaction with the other person will be in the same breakout room. 

Anyways, I used the word "claim" because a lot of people actually didn't choose the person with the very LEAST interaction with. Anyways, I saw this coming so I chose this girl that I'm comfortable with and one that the teacher would think passes on my least interacted list. 

We were told to get to know each other in 10 minutes through asking questions but then of course if I just started asking questions since the beginning this whole thing could feel more like an interrogation than a get-to-know-each-other thing. 

Knowing this I used the first two minutes or so just to talk lightly about some stuff and catch up a little bit since it HAS been quite a while since I've talked with her. Yea so after that the questions went a lot smoother because there was already an unspoken trust that bonded the two people together. 

Perhaps sometimes people don't realize but small gestures or actions could change the mood entirely and build rapport simultaneously. I'd say this part went great for me, hmm maybe I could ask some more deep questions the next time something similar comes up. Oh I'll look into it later. 

Then of course, what's PE without a workout? So we did a Pilates workout. Great. 

Following up we have Algebra! Today's class was an advancement class. We learned about how to generate Pythagorean triples. 

Um, actually I think I talked about this on my blog three months back... Nevertheless, we finally got out of radicals! I'd call that progress. Mhm anyways I'll get going now and then tomorrow is FRIDAYYYYY! 

Btw, did you know that Saturday and Sunday are the strongest days of the week? All the other days are weekdays. GET IT?? weakdays? HAHAHAHAHHAHAHHAA ok yeah lol I'll end it here. 

Speech Openings

Imagine if the world turned upside down. 

 

Would we be walking on our hands or our feet? How would gravity even work? 

That's a great question. Today, I won't be answering it. 

Hahaha so according to this website I found if you start a speech with the word "Imagine" your audience is more likely to "tune in" to your speech instead of simply blocking you out with their own thoughts. You see, the author of this website actually is quite right. 

When someone starts with: “Hello, everyone. Thank you for having me. My name is ______ _______, and I am going to be speaking to you today about _______. To begin, _______ is important because…”, people just start to tune out the speaker and shift in their seats, glance at the time, you know how it is because you've probably been in this situation more than once before. There were also some other ways, likeeeee 

That. Well, it was my best representation of it. Silence. Surprised? Mhm, I was too! 

People tend to start talking immediately when they step up onto the podium but sometimes you gotta take your time, ease up a little, your audience sways with your emotions. If you're tense when you go up there to talk, your audience takes up on that too! You can slap in a little joke in there too but don't go for those super huge laughs, go for those tiny smiles that ease up the tension, and also warms up the crowd to your main topic. 

So when you ever have a speech, you can go up and boom hit them with the silent bomb. Silence for around 5-10 seconds should be good and then you will have all eyes on you. 

Quotes also work. And quotes are amazing. You know you should just look up quotes and some are super deep and well you just think you yourself, wow it would be awesome to use this sometime. And so I do. LOL

OK time seems to be running short. So let's tortilla this up. Get it? Wrap and tortilla are the same thing! So I just substituted one for another! I don't think that worked. oops. Moving on! 

School wasn't at all that fun today. English, did some discussion questions. Spanish, worked on the little PowerPoint. And History worked on workbook pages. See? Today's class wasn't too interesting. 

And then STOCKS ROSE! YAY! I'M FINALLY OUT OF THE NEGATIVES! I'M AT POSITIVE 38 DOLLARS! but, we must've let the shortsighted happiness get in our way of the long term goal. Today means nothing unless we can maintain it. Learn from it. heh heh I'm still pretty happy though. I was getting scared when I was down by 150 dollars for like three days straight so this really helps my ego. 

So I gotta leave now. Adios and stay awesome my friends.

 q&a with governor candidates

Hello! Wow, I need to find more creative intros LOL

A big part of school today was this Q&A session with the candidates running for Puerto Rico governor.  We still needed to take our first class as normal though so here we go. 

Physics! The first thing we did was go over the answers to the quiz we took last class and the teacher even asked to use mine as an example to show the class cuz I got 100% lol. 

Anyways we went over that, which took about 15 minutes, and then we moved on to today's new material. Newton's second law of motion! yay. It really wasn't that bad though, the equation is just the world-famous F=ma and then some additional knowledge that was pretty simple. Um, we had a bit of homework for Physics too but I got it done pretty quickly. 

So, we're finally here at the Q&A session. There's just one teeny-tiny problem. IT'S ALL IN SPANISHHH and you know what at first I thought ok I can do Spanish. Well turns out these candidates talk Spanish at ten thousand words per minute so I barely understood anything. 

Luckily Rama was in English and the teacher was summarizing the candidate's answers for them so I asked him for the google meet link. I joined in and so I got mostly all of the needed information down. I thank her for that a lot LOL. Basically, this session lasted all the way into lunch so I had to skip my music class. 

And then for PE, we learned about this new type of exercise called Pilates. Invented by George Pilates in the 1920s this mind/body principle is meant to bring the body and mind together. It helps improve your flexibility and develop your whole-body strength and when he created it he taught it to his internees which got them through the influenza epidemic safe and sound. 

Lol, so as you can see the teacher had also prepared a lot of facts that I'll probably forget about soon but oh well, maybe it'll kick back in sometime later. 

Hmm, then in Algebra we didn't really do anything. Full review of the exercises we did in the workbook. Oh, and in the middle, the teacher flexed on us by saying that his whole house was solar-powered and it also charges his Tesla LOL. 

And speaking of tesla, literally for the first half of the day the market was going pretty smooth and then all of the sudden it crashed because of Trump's decision to halt stimulus talks. My money just dropped over 120 dollars in less than 3 minutes. Jeez. So yea I'm back in the negatives. We'll see how it goes tomorrow. 

Welp there's only 5 minutes left so i gtg cya

 Finished Form

Shalom, my friend. We gather here today, as I have less than 30 minutes to finish this thing and go to bed. SOOO, without further ado, let's get right into it. 

Hmm, all of today's classes were quite productive. In English, we were divided into groups to work on this pretty long worksheet and the teacher's internet went out so we needed to be pretty independent for most of today's class. I feel like I communicated fairly well with my group today so I'm kinda proud of that fact because all three of them were girls and yeah yeah I shouldn't judge but I mean I've always had a hard time trying to talk with them so I'll take today as an accomplishment. 

Oh, we also enrolled in the teacher's Membean class today so from now on, the grind is officially starting. It's official. Do you hear that Psi? The world is calling our names. haha ok next was Spanish. 

First, the teacher had the people that hadn't presented yet present their little project and then she announced and explained this new project we were going to be doing. The project is to read and shortly prepare a small PowerPoint on a fable that each group was assigned. I got Fox in my group so communication shouldn't be a problem. 

I might actually work on it tomorrow a bit since the teacher did mention that we had to finish it in class on Wednesday but just in case time doesn't suffice... I'll do most of it tomorrow. 

OKIE after this we've arrived at the final station of today's schoolday. History! 

Um at the start of the class the teacher presented her screen to a monster of a PowerPoint which had one native or endemic animal per slide. It was 137 slides. Can you believe that?? Well yes, 137 and she almost went through all of them. I mean it wasn't a very detailed explanation for each one but I was still super impressed that she had remembered over 100 different animals that call Puerto Rico home. 

Mhm then following that we needed to watch this one hour documentary IN SPANISH, and take notes on it. The class time had ended before we got to finish watching the whole thing so we got assigned the rest for homework. 

Then after school, I finally finished that NJHS form that had been bugging me for so long. They asked for leadership positions and I really didn't know what to write for that part so I asked Dino since he had filled it out already. You know what he said? 

Dino said that he put his soccer position as his leadership position LOLLL and so I did the same. 

Actually, I filled two spaces with my volleyball position as middle blocker MDRRR I put one for school and then another one for my club. Then I also wrote about my CEO experience at the summer camp. 

For service projects, my dad said that I could write in the online tutoring which btw hasn't even started yet but he said that I was going to be participating in it later on so I might as well write it in. And I didn't really have that many other options so I just did what he said. 

Umm, then there was commitments. EASY. So many. I mean there's math, piano, two volleyballs, model UN, investment club, and I mean I think I got that one in the bag. 

Finally, there's awards. Well, I didn't even struggle there at all, I mean I have this whole row of medals just hanging on my bed. Just pick and choose a couple and we're set! 

AND I ONLY HAVE ONE MINUTE LEFTTTTTTTT. ADIOS MIS AMIGOS Y BUENAS NOCHES!!!

voice changes

Heyyyy what's up everyone! It's Jerry here back with another post, I think it's been at least over 100 consecutive posts already LOLL BUT we must not break the streak. Oh wow, isn't it funny how break and streak don't rhyme? 

Anyways, I took my Chinese class with my grandma, and for today's class my cousin showed up too. So there was this one part where she got out a story and she made it like a script so the three of us divided roles. 

There was the narrator, the little horse which was the protagonist, the mama horse, the old bull, and the squirrel. OK so basically the roles would be the protagonist, the narrator, and then the other three characters are one single role. 

So when it was my turn to do the three characters role I changed my voice for each one to you know, develop the character more, and give the audience a sense that each character has its own personality, its own voice. I used a deep voice for the bull while also saying the words real slow making the age really show. Then for the mama horse, I used a really parenting tone, one that only a mother would use and a slightly higher voice than my usual voice. Then for the squirrel, wow I just went full-on super-duper high pitched and my cousin couldn't stop laughing in between my voice changes LOL. 

Hmm maybe I could try incorporating it more in just daily conversations and perhaps that'll make every day talking more fun in general. hmm but then I still need to work on them a bit more as to make the switches seem more natural. Really I think that reading out loud is actually a skill that a lot of people don't focus on too much but is actually more important than they think it is. 

Truly getting involved and encompassing yourself with the literature written on the page, touching the listener with your words and tone, that's a skill that everyone should start learning. I should do some research on it too and share some of it with you guys later on. 

My mom went to her store today so it was just me and dad again, we actually played another board game called 军棋 and this one he's a lot better at. I lost both games that we played ouch. I WILL GET MY REVENGE! I'll search for strategies online and then make it into a unique style of my own. muahahaha, your wins to loss ratio WILL drop soon, beware... 

OH NO THERE'S ONLY SIX MINUTES LEFT AND THEN MY PHONE WILL GET TAKEN AWAY FOR FORTY-EIGHT HOURS!!!!!! NOOOO i will leave now. adios mis amigos. gute nacht.

 Hidden Opportunity

So how's it going? LOL isn't that how everyone starts off a conversation nowadays? Like when I go into my google meet take a class and it's only me and the teacher I feel like they always start with that phrase or something along the lines of it. And then I think no matter how you're actually feeling you'll always say "good. how about you?" and then they say "good." and the conversation stops because no one has seen each other for so long. 

Anyways, I didn't have any school today because after all, it IS Saturday but I did take a class on math which was training for CENTRO and the OMPR organization had coordinated it so why not attend? Well here's a reason why: It was completely in Spanish. 

And I know what you might be thinking, but Jerry, you're a complete GOD at Spanish! And I would agree because everyone likes a compliment LOL but when it comes to mathematical jargon (membean word btw), the whole math lexicon (another membean word), then my Spanish vocabulary size just shrinks. The terms that are used are barely or never seen in normal everyday language and my Spanish class doesn't teach specific mathematical terms and their meanings. 

So, I just tried to guess what some words meant but my picture when constructing a diagram for a geometry problem looked completely wrong LOL and turns out what I originally thought was a perpendicular bisector was an angle bisector. 

OHH and then I came across some cool songs today. I think some songs if you don't listen closely to the lyrics then they sound amazingly happy and cheerful but when you actually look at the lyrics they are very sad. Melancholic. Mmm, one of them is "Nothing's Gonna Change My Love For You". Actually, I'm pretty sure that I've heard this song somewhere before because it sounds so familiar but the name I've never actually seen before. So I suggest that you could try listening to it, it's definitely a classic and personally, I love classic songs lol. 

Umm, I also played some Chinese chess today with my dad. Beat him both rounds. he did better in the first round in my opinion but I'm still a beginner. I don't even think I've played ten games yet. 

Yeah, for the rest of the day I talked a ton with Canary LOL, and well really distance hasn't been that much of a problem for us for some reason and I'm happy it hasn't. Ohh right and she said that she was afraid of the dark so I gave her my own remedy of conquering the fear. It'll make the dark a lot less scary and maybe even enjoyable at times. The cool temperature, nice and quiet, sometimes you never know how much you'll appreciate something until you lose it. 

You know, going to school, leaving for work, hanging out with friends, occasionally you might not want to do it but now a lot of people are missing the old days. As they say, when life closes a door on you, smash right through it. Just kidding LOL you gotta find another way right? In every adversity, every problem, every terrifying and scary situation, there's a hidden opportunity. And those who can capture those opportunities will succeed and prosper. 

YAWNNNN I'm kinda tired after some late-night philosophy. Good night!!

0 minutes

Hmm, let's see... Today was a fine day.  

It's Friday and like in previous weeks the Friday schedules started at 8:10 so I woke up early to get in the room at 8:10 but then when I went in, I was alone. Lucky for me Beam came in after like a minute of  waiting and informed me that they changed the schedule for Friday AGAIN. So yeah, I hadn't even eaten any breakfast to not get late and then since the start classes started at 8:30. sheesh. Oh well, I ate something quick and then actually started classes. 

Remember that each class is only 25 minutes so it's hard to get too much done. In Physics the whole class was dedicated to taking a quiz, (which I aced btw cuz im a god); albeit the material was still pretty new it wasn't that difficult in my opinion. Basic knowledge on vectors and you're basically set. 

Then we had Music, and they just talked and droned on about the tempo and the recording thing they were going to be using to compile the whole song together. I bet the result will still be kinda messy because I mean it's practically impossible that everyone does it at the exact same tempo when you can't hear the other people play.

In PE we did a short little workout and in Algebra we did some problems on radicals. Following that was English, in today's class she went over the mid-unit assessment we were going to be taking on Monday I believe. It's a paragraph that we will write based on the text we've been working on and she even gave us the prompt because she wants us to think beforehand on what to write about since she thinks that we aren't going to finish in the 80 minutes of class time. Now, was the previous sentence a run-on sentence? please tell me in the comments. I'm definitely going to start the paragraph and roughly sketch out an outline before the actual assessment because well, she gave us this opportunity for a reason right? 

OK, Spanish. We did an analysis of a quote and then presentations. Today she didn't want to waste time making an order of presentations so she did it alphabetically. And it just so happens that I'm the first on her little list. eh, the presentation went fairly smooth but she correctly a couple of grammar mistakes mostly on reflexive verbs. She took off 3 whole points though and I really don't know what else went wrong besides the grammar part but nevertheless, she deducted the points and left me with a 22/25 which is 88% OUCH. Now my overall Spanish grade is an A- and I really need to raise that soon somehow. 

The final class is History. We got to pick any endemic animal of Puerto Rico and write out a quick description of them to present to the class. I picked the thick-tailed scorpion at first and I even had the whole description ready but then the teacher picked Rama to be the first one to present AND HE PICKED THE EXACT SAME ONE OUT OF LIKE 300!! What are the chances?? So I swiftly watched another video and did the Green Banana Cockroach lol. It blends in with leaves. And it's not a pest. That's basically all I had LOL but I didn't want to do a duplicate so yea. 

WOW I ONLY HAVE 3 MINUTES LEFT AND I HAVENT EVEN WRITTEN ABOUT THE GRADUATION. what do i do. Should I sacrifice my phone tomorrow to write down today's thoughts? hmm, you know what ill try to write what I can but beware of a very sudden ending due to the lack of time. I looked really good in today's outfit lol. 

White dress shirt with cufflinks, these black long pants, shiny black leather shoes, new haircut mdr, very green cape, and the hat that I personally didn't like very much. We had to wait a couple minutes after we got there but when it was finally my turn the whole process was a little different than what I was expecting. 

The photographer guy says, stand here and come here and bow to the principal, get the diploma, stand here and smile, and then when you walk down to your parents everyone applaud, and then hug your parents. Well not in one whole sentence but you get the idea. NOO one minute left. This is bad. What do I do. Omg I think i just broke my typing speed record. ok ok ok what else what else, I just think the whole "graduation ceremony" thing was kinda staged but I guess they did that to make everyone's look the same. Which is pretty boring but it makes sense. ok gtg, im sorry. CYA