First Crosscountry Race

Just a couple of hours ago, I ran in the first crosscountry meet of the local season. Only four people from my school, including myself, participated: three guys, one girl. The guys' race was a little more than a half hour after the girls', so there was a little more time for us to warm up and stretch, and for the weather to cool down. (It was pretty hot anyway.)

My team was definitely the smallest out of all the teams; it wouldn't surprise me if some of the other local schools' crosscountry teams were bigger than my high school student body.

We took our positions at the edge of the starting line. When the starting gun fired, I took a slow, maintainable pace because I do not have a lot of endurance. In the next ten minutes or so, I steadily gained positions; apparently a lot of people had burst out with an untenable pace at the beginning. The track was 4 kilometers long, taking us through a lot of forest. (That was nice, because it was mostly shaded.) Near the end, I was very tired, but I never had to drop to a walk. At the very end stretch, I lost a few positions as people used final bursts of speed because I didn't have any strength left to match them.

I finished about 10 seconds behind the first runner on my team and about 30 seconds ahead of the previous. I don't remember my position/percentile in the total pool of racers, but I think it might have been close to the 40th percentile.

I was very tired after the entire thing. Going home and taking a shower was excellent.

Causality and Good Habits in Education

Some classes at my school require the students to periodically produce a meta-cognitive exercise, which consists of answering several questions about how you are doing, what you can improve on, and what your goals are.

They do this allegedly because very successful people can think about how they are thinking, and so I suppose the reasoning behind having us do this is "oh, let's have them do this thing successful people do and then they will be successful."

Random grammar note! If you follow my other blog, Fleex's Lab, you'll notice that over there I always place punctuation outside quotation marks. I do that because it is more logical, unambiguous, and looks more like programming, which is the subject of that blog. Over here I'll make some minimal effort to adhere to formal writing standards, as demonstrated by this random and totally unrelated tangent which has dragged on for a while now.

Anyway, just because successful people do something doesn't mean that you will be successful if you do it. The causality might be the other way around: people who are successful do it because they are successful, and they are successful because their mind works in this way. Look at it another way: many successful people are arrogant and rich. Should we cultivate arrogance and give lots of money to students in order to make them successful? No! That would be silly, because the cause-and-effect relationship doesn't allow that to work.

It might be entirely true that trying to use metacognition will tune your brain to make you think more effectively, or maybe you can't do anything about it. I'd like to see a study sometime; I will look it up soonish.

2014's First Full Day of School

Yesterday was a short half-day dedicated to introducing the year, the school policies, and the school itself. Today was a full day - the first full day - and dedicated to the start of actual classes. The class sessions for today were mostly introductions in themselves, with the teachers giving out course syllabi, schedules, and general feels of welcomedness to the class.

In history, we actually started doing things. After getting class policies out of the way, we compiled a list of issues facing the United States today. We will use that list in our study of history to see if and how it was handled before, and maybe understand more of the dilemmas.

In theater, we did some acting exercises and individually wrote down what role we hope to have in the play we will produce.

My study halls were used for reading and continuing to negotiate the finer details of my use of the school-issued laptop.

Start of the School Year, 2014

Today marks the beginning of my 2014-15 academic year, this time in the sophomore class. I am actually looking forward to starting this year, and I don't know exactly why. I suppose there are a lot of exciting changes, I'll see my classmates again, and it should be a vacation compared to my college work over the summer.

There are lots of new faculty, including a new IT Director who has experience in web design and mobile app development. A new mathematics teacher also has a background in computer programming in addition to (obviously) mathematics.

The upper school is also moving to a college-style schedule, so the daily schedule's time allocation is dramatically different between {Monday Wednesday Friday} and {Tuesday Thursday}. Tuesday and Thursday have just two or three extremely long class periods each. The most interesting feature of this new schedule is the presence of teacher "office hours" for half a period length at the end of the day.

And, of course, laptops! This deal has yet to be worked out; I am considering buying my own. We shall see.

Anyway, today was a nice orientation to the new policies and a great start to the '14-15 school year.