lets see how much updates i can write here before i lose motivation to
i feel like most of my writing is becoming forced here, idk why i just look at others posts and go 'oh cool maybe i should write like that and not like a weird little ava' also whenever i have an idea to write smth i just run out of motivation after 30 minutes of doomscrolling or junk food, so i just ate one chocolate chip cookie, no doom scrolling, and decided to write for the purpose of rambling, recording my thoughts (they don't have to be that grand) for future reference, and knowing my plans for today.
finals >v<
ok so finals is coming up, it's on 15 december so i have like 3 weeks (4 weekends) left and there are 7 subjects (compared to 5 during midterms) and today i got my 사회 and 도덕 textbook so i can study those for this weekend. i actually focus in class during 사회 cuz i learned i should do that when preparing for the midterms, well i mean of course you're supposed to focus in class but sometimes you just want the class to end and illogically stare at the clock every 30 secs, and i do that for most subjects that weren't in midterms. anyways because of that i am more familiar with 사회 than 도덕1 and therefore i will not read the textbook before baekjing for 사회, i will read for 도덕. also i do not understand a lot of stuff for science, idk what they are but i just don't. maybe i should have brought my science textbook home too but that'd be 3 textbooks and that would heavy2 my backpack. also i have a pdf ver of my social studies and science textbooks, cuz they're both from the same publishing company and they actually have the entire textbook pdf online, while for the others i have no idea how to find theirs. but still the textbooks don't feel... real enough? idk sometimes screens are cool and all, they keep my desk and files organized. anyways the biggest problem of using pdf textbooks is that i can't use em at school to take notes and therefore the pdf textbook has no notes, especially for science my teacher gives us a bunch of hints about the test and i write them down, most of the time she doesn't overtly tell kids to write it down but when she emphasizes something that isn't in the textbook or says something is important it is beneficial3 to do that. anyways yeah this weekend's goal in terms of finals:
- 사회: 아메리카 백지 & 10문제 만들기 (나머지 2개 단원4도 1주에 1개씩 똑같이 진행 예정)
- 도덕: II-3, III-1 교과서 읽고 백지, 10문제 만들기
ohh wait i haven't started writing my afterschool notes yet! but usually at this time i'm procrastinating (it's 4:18, i get home at 3pm, and i usually start writing my afterschool notes at 4:305) so i guess it would not be a waste of time to write about what i mean by 'afterschool notes' and whether it has helped me or not.
(ok it's actually 4:26pm but who cares)
afterschool notes
so i like to take notes / ramble about class after the class, you think i could do that during class but my desk is too full for a notebook and my focus is too crap to write notes and listen to the class at the same time. back in 1st semester i started writing on little post-its and putting them in textbooks for social studies and science. but that didn't show the whole picture of what i learned throughout the day. plus i wanted to record other stuff besides just textbook related content said by my teacher, i wanted to create something from my memory that contains not just the material but also my thoughts, and also i wanted my notes to be easily editable but still look cool. so i ended up using notion to record what i learned every day after school. (tbh idk what i just wrote in this paragraph)
it's kinda gwichan hard to do this every day, every day i kinda have a fight with myself to get up, stop doomscrolling, and start writing a day review, but ppl sometimes don't know the good things about what they have. i think it does help me recall what i learned, sometimes i will write a full-fledged note, sometimes i just write what unit we were on, and anything helps cuz at least i know i did something in class. but you know how i said it's gwichan i don't feel like doing this every day? well yea so a lot of times i will skip writing about what i felt or did, or even checking to see if i understood the content, which kinda erases the purpose of the afterschool note. also sometimes it takes away time for homework or studying math, but sometimes there are other subjects to study that aren't math.
anyways, i think i should focus more on what i did or felt in my afterschool notes. also the afterschool notes is the first daily review thing i did consistently for 4 weeks (ok tbh i didn't write notes for this week's monday and wednesday. but wow 4 weeks that is impressive for someone like me who is very 작심삼일 make mind three days not someone who keeps routines for more than three days) i should do the same thing for at home studying, from school related stuff like math, test prep, or homework to personal projects like conlanging, writing, reading, and potentially studying lingusitics/math6.
or i could make things more lightweight by writing things initially in my analogue planner (the planner is smaller so i feel like i could go with writing less) and then copy everything onto notion and ramble if i feel like rambling.
random thought: it looks really cool when ppl study with two curriculums, one from school and one from another thing they do personally. it looks especially cool when they're bilingual.
anyways. next off, math!
math (without hakwon!)
one time i complained about my math hakwon and quit it, then proceeded to email those posts to a human who posted about me which made another human post about me and the first human, and i never wrote about how i've been doing without hakwons. because i might as well be a grumpy baby who doesn't want to go through hardships and be better at math.
studying math without hakwon was rocky for three months, i didn't know where to start, so i ended up abandoning the high school curriculum and restarting from middle school, but then there was the finals which made me stop studying math entirely, then midterms was over and i got a 100 in math (as well as social studies, and i got a score in science that i wouldn't have gotten if i hadn't studied. and the time i spent studying social studies and science, i would have spent it doing my math homework if i was still in hakwon. so who said not going to hakwon will harm my scores?) but i was stressed because that was the first time the majority of my peers were ahead of me in their math grade level so that distracted me, but i can finally announce that i have a consistent math study schedule that makes me happy and involves both solving problems and understanding concepts correctly!!!
some principals7 that i have made8:
- challenge myself with hard problems! i am sick of easy problems and it will make me bored easily, i mean yeah i should do a couple easy problems to think about how the thing i learned works, but that's boring and doesn't motivate me which will make me not study math long-term
- always think about what i used to solve a problem and what other ways i can solve the problem tbh i am bad at this, but i try
- i am allowed to go off curriculum, as long as i have a question/purpose
relating to the first two rules, i have four folders for math problems i want to check later:
- 다른 풀이: when there are multiple ways to solve a problem. usually it's discovered when i solve a problem, the AI looks at my notes and thinks my solution is wrong because it's different from what the answer key says, and i look at the answer key and discover i could also solve the problem that way.9
- 그냥 개쩌는 문제: problems that i found challenging or unique
- 흥미로운 문제: any other problem that is interesting for me, usually i have a specific question that is indirectly related to the problem. unfortunately i can't write the reason down because for some reason 수학대왕 doesn't let me write extra notes for problems.
- 자주 틀리는 문제: self explanatory \''/
oh right i was gonna explain why i got motivated to learn math! in summary, math youtubers making advanced math look cool and realizing a bunch of things i learn in 7th grade math can be proved through calculus.
actually i do have more updates but i just got caught by this vid so ill write those later
why am i writing all the subject names in korean when they can be translated into english? cuz why not. it's not like anybody sees my posts. maybe some ppl did when i posted the bearblog carnival thing and two people talked about me complaining about quitting hakwon, like there was a lot of views then, but now nobody cares about whatever the heck i write. or maybe i just clicked on my blog too much to check how many upvotes i got lol↩
in the spirit of toki pona, change parts of speech :D (but i think i heard the word get used this way before)↩
oh hi, team benefecal!↩
사실 범위는 네 단원인데 그 중 한 단원은 한 차시밖에 시험을 안 본다. 그래서 딴 단원이랑 같이 볼 것이다.↩
back in international school, i learned to call this 'half past four'. nobody used it outside of class. (the reason: the students at school used primarily chinese, my parents used american english, korea uses american english, 'half past four' i assume is british↩
this week i got a book called '수학의 숲을 걷다' from the school library, and it is very fun and forces me to take notes because it is impossible to navigate the book without proving everything myself.↩
while writing the list below, i realized i made principles, not principals, but it is funny. therefore i will keep it there so the readers can imagine me making leaders of schools.↩
like a lot of english hakwons, our english hakwon has a weekly test on 5 irregular verb conjugations. i always question if some verbs are strong or not, end up writing them as strong, and get it wrong. i like to do that with the verb 'make' by saying its past participle is 'maken'.↩
however most of the time the AI is stupid and misreads handwriting / misinterprets my intention etc. and that is why you should not trust AI for math. of course, the funniest things can be seen in the community tab where people ask questions about certain math problems and the AI tries to solve everything using the pythagorean theorem when in fact the student is not supposed to know the pythagorean theorem or it is unsolvable by the pythagorean theorem.↩