Why I don’t take notes

So I’ve started working as a course assistant. For those of you not in the know, I’m looking to leverage my mathematics experience to transition into a career teaching high school math. And now, in addition to taking classes to learn how to be a teacher, I’m also assisting for a course. The course in question is about teaching arithmetic.

My primary responsibility is grading the homework, but I also participate some during class time. So while I’m sitting in the classes, I notice that every time the professor asks a question of the class, many of the students look up from their notebooks and pause. I can’t help but see that as shifting gears from carefully writing what they’re being taught to thinking about the material so they can address the question. After all, it’s what would be going on in my mind had I been taking notes.

That need to shift gears is one reason I don’t like taking notes. You see, I learned in 9th grade that the only thing I learn when I take notes in class is how to take notes in class.

About halfway through the year, our history teacher was replaced with a long-term substitute. His method of teaching consisted of spending the entire class time writing on the board so that we could spend our entire class time writing it all down. He told us that part of our grade depended on our notebooks. Well, I didn’t give it much weight. I spent the first couple of weeks in class reading and thinking about what he was writing. And I wrote none of it down.

Guess what happened.

First, I was able to absorb the material easily ’cause focussing on it was all I did – there were no distractions. Second, when it came time to give us our grades for the first marking period with him, I got an ‘F’. He based my entire grade on my lack of a notebook.

So I was forced to take notes. And forced to stop understanding the material during class time because my mind just couldn’t spare the effort to think about the concepts/history/facts while also carefully recording it all.

Then, come graduation time, there was a third consequence. Turns out that in my small high school class of 153 students, the students with the two best grade averages were precisely tied, and I was one of them. The powers that be decided that because of my one ‘F’, I would be salutatorian.

Now one could argue that the lesson to take from that experience is the importance of taking notes, but the lesson I took from it was different. The lesson I learned is that other people can’t know what’s best for you, and what’s best for you may even be considered wrong/bad by the rest of society.

Now, back to the subject of this post.

So I’ve been sitting in class for three weeks now, and every time I see the students raise their heads and shift gears, my heart drops a little in sympathy for the professor. He’s not at all like my 9th grade history sub. He engages the class, raises interesting issues, and generally tries to get them all to, in the words of another math professor I’ve worked with, “think deeply of simply things”, though he doesn’t put it that way. And yet, many of them are spending their class time dutifully recording his wisdom, apparently for future reference so they can then understand the material at their leisure.

Which brings me to the second reason I don’t like taking notes.

I can’t perfectly record the intent of any instructor – for two reasons. First, I make mistakes. Second, so does every instructor. So when I spend my class time writing notes, what is on paper will have errors in it. And when I finally get around to looking at it, I’ll most certainly not have the instructor around to help at catching those mistakes.

How do I learn the course material from error filled notes? Very poorly.

This was demonstrated very effectively when I was in grad school studying number theory. Some of the professors regularly used class time to present material that augmented (read: wasn’t in) the texts used. I had to take notes then because the subjects were hard enough that I couldn’t absorb all of the information during class. But when I reviewed my notes, they weren’t any easier to understand – the only thing I gained by having the notes was time, if I had enough to spare, that is.

So now that I’m taking classes again, I’m deliberately, consciously, not taking notes. If I find I can’t completely absorb some idea, I make sure to at least remember enough of it so that I can later look it up on Wikipedia (or the web in general, which didn’t yet exist when last I was a student).

After all, what good is taking a class if I don’t use the class time itself to actively interact with the instructor, when everything I might want to learn can be found these days on the web?

Only Idiots Trust Fox News

So maybe you watch the Fox News Channel religiously. Or maybe you just watch it occasionally. If you value your intelligence and ability to function in society, please stop watching it now.

Here’s why. On July 13th, on their show “The Five”, Eric Bolling made the following comment:

“Whether they did or didn’t, America was certainly safe between 2000 and 2008. I don’t remember any terrorist attacks on American soil during that period of time.”

Here’s three sources confirming the quote and giving it context: from Huffington Post, from Media Matters, and from The Five’s own web site.

Of course that’s not the whole story. The next day, “The Five” made a correction.

Now, I suppose you might think, “They corrected their mistake, so what’s the big deal?”, but I hope for your sake that you don’t. If you do think that, let me remind you that there were two other domestic attacks in that time period: the anthrax attacks and the unsuccessful shoe-bomber. Also, if Eric Bolling really did mean “post 9/11″, why was he so specific to state “between 2000 and 2008″? Since when is the year 2001 before 2000? If they actually cared about presenting true statements, why didn’t any of the other panel members correct him at the time? And, as you can see here, it’s not the first time for Fox News.

In an interest to be fair, Fox News isn’t alone in propagating false information. Consider this statement from CNN:

For decades, Goldberg traveled back and forth from New York to Los Angeles via private bus. With two drivers, she was able to arrive on the other coast in 23 hours.

But to catch that mistake, you need to know that driving only 23 hours to travel between New York and Los Angeles means her bus averaged roughly 121mph or that the record is 31+ hours.

But I don’t think CNN is aware of their mistake and I suspect their mistake is mostly likely one made by a single journalist and editor. Fox News on the other hand is aware of their mistake and addressed it with more misinformation.

Whether you think it’s a pair of honest mistakes, or deliberate attempts to spread falsehoods, the point of this article is still valid. Given Fox’s clear, unabashed distortion of well-known facts, then even occasional viewing will contort your world view, or at least your ability to correctly compare two similar numbers.

So if you want to continue to function in our society, please stop watching Fox News Channel. Well, ok, you could decide instead to push for everyone to watch it with you, so you’re not alone in your idiocy.

As turkey day approaches…

I’m busy with a final project for my first course in 15 or so years. I’m actually relatively frantic at it, coding and designing and debugging about 7 hours a day. It’s almost like a job.
Mind you, I’m taking the course as the first of a series on the road to a masters degree, all so that I might have a better chance at getting a job. Having not worked in 8 or so years, I feel the need to do something.
And Mom asks me what is special about this therapist that has me improving so markedly this last year. Not that I can answer that, but I can say that I’ve not yet seen this therapist a whole year.
I can also say that there’s a chance I might stop therapy as soon as December – but that’s up in the air.
Mom will be visiting over the weekend, sharing my hermit’s nest for a few days. And I’ll have to do my best to ignore her so that I can focus on my project. But not Jim, because Fidget, their dog, isn’t quite himself atm, and they don’t think he should be left alone the whole time.
Turkey day will be at my cousin’s home. Never been there before and according to Mapquest, it’s about an hour away from here.
And what’s the point of this ramble? Well, just to get an update out there really. I think I’m doing well with life’s curves and that deserves some recognition. And I’ve joined a gym. I don’t think there was much in the way of reasoning about that decision, I just felt like doing it, felt ready, willing, able and in need.
Yes, it’s hard, but so far, I’m enjoying it. Never thought I’d say that about a gym. Oh well, it’s said.
And other news, MIT has decided, or rather, Prudential on MIT’s behalf, that I’m no longer disabled. Here, I am, at a day that I once feared, the day when someone else says of me, “He’s ready to work.” and I’m still not ready for it. I find I’m not ready, not because of still being in need of help, but because I didn’t plan for it when I started the course or started the gym. So yes, I’m not ready, but I’m not ready in what is likely the best way possible.
Oh, and should you find yourself seeing me in person sometime in the future, don’t offer me a pepsi – I’ve gone cold turkey, no more caffeine, so no more pepsi. Yes, I now I could get caffeine free pepsi, but my decision was actually based on having started at the gym. All that sugared water, seemed counterproductive. So I stopped.
What more can I say?
My final project is a game for the iPad, not an original game, but with some original twists. I treat solitaire mahjong (I think it’s also called taipei), not as a solitaire game to be played quickly, but as a puzzle. A puzzle with a solution that needs to be found and deduced. I have until Dec. 9 to get it working – I probably won’t get implemented all the features I have in mind, but I’m confident it will be solid at what it does do.
And that’s that for now. May thanksgiving be a good day for you.

< 3 hours and 4 seconds

So I’ve been absent a while. My course started about 6 weeks ago, and I’ve been busy working away at the assignments. Acing them, mostly due to my previous experience, and partly due to my copious free time. In spite of the introductory nature of the subject, I have been learning.
Learning mostly about how various techniques, methods and algorithms are so well documented out in the internet, if one just takes a little time to search. It’s perfect for my own abilities to be able to say, “I need to know how to do this” and just go find out how.
Now, the latest assignment had, as part of its requirements, the goal of writing a solver for sudoku puzzles. And that taught me all about the notion of an exact cover and how it’s useful for solving sudoku puzzles. Since I suspect none of my readers knows what an exact cover is (I didn’t at first either), I’ll briefly give an example.
Suppose you’re organizing a bake sale, and you have 10 potential contributors, each of which will want to bring her/his two or three best baked goods. You want every imaginable kind available, but no repeats – that is, every possible baked good shows up once and no baked good shows up twice. How do you choose who to ask to bring baked goods? Your answer, if there is one, is what is called in mathematics an exact cover.
Now I suppose that you, my dear reader, are curious about where I’m going with all this. Well, two Christmases ago, I received a puzzle as a gift. Ok, make that a fiendishly hard puzzle as a gift. I worked on it, off and on, for a while, before setting it aside. It involved attempting to construct a 5x5x5 cube, perfectly filled, using 25 identically shaped pentominoes (think dominoes, but with 5 cubes instead of 2).
Well last night, during a common bout of insomnia, it occurred to me that that puzzle is perfect for solving using the techniques I learned for the sudoku assignment. In other words, I had a programming project ahead of me, and one that I was quite happily itching to do.
Less than three hours later, my program was done. No, I didn’t construct the whole thing from scratch in that time, I used parts of code from the sudoku assignment that I’d already put together for that purpose. Still, with under three hours of effort devoted solely to solving this puzzle, I had a working program.
I ran the program.
Less than 4 seconds later, I had an answer.

The right to worship? A reprise

There is an important, yet subtle, point left completely unsaid in my previous entry. While I make the case in support of our government not blocking the mosque, I come close, perhaps dangerously so, to saying that our government should support the mosque.

I’ll be blunt. In my view, our government must, from its very foundation, support the right to build the mosque and also must, from its very foundation, not support the building of the mosque.

This subtle difference is quite markedly present in the First Amendment to our Constitution, more clearly, perhaps, than simply declaring that Congress must remain neutral. Supporting the building of the mosque would directly contravene Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. Likewise, not supporting the right to build would directly contravene prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

Confusing the two points is easily done, but must necessarily be avoided. To re-iterate: either the fact that the building is a mosque has zero bearing on its right to be built near the twin towers site, or you have zero rights in our country to practice your favorite religion, whatever it may be.

Our government’s voice, defined by our First Amendment and stated recently by NYC mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, is clear: allow the mosque to proceed and reinforce our country’s foundation, or block it and destroy ourselves from within.

The right to worship?

The relevant basis for our religious rights in this country stems from the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

There is also the application of this amendment to what states have the right to do, courtesy of the Fourteenth Amendment, which is technically needed to apply the rights at a state level too. One might argue that municipalities are not restricted, which opens up a whole different can of worms than I wish to discuss herein.

What I wish to get at is this: President Obama’s primary responsibility is to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.

Now the meaty topic of the moment seems to be about a desire by some people to build a mosque near the site of the former twin towers. I have explicitly not been following the discussion because, to me, the issue is a simple one. If someone wishes to block the efforts to build the mosque, it has to be done without any reference to the religion that would be practiced therein. Otherwise, rights are infringed by those attempting to block the mosque. In short, as long as the people seeking the building of the mosque obey relevant ordinances regarding the construction of the building, fire laws regarding maximum occupancy, whatever, then it has every right to be there.

President Obama has, as I understand it, voiced the view that, while it may not be a wise choice, the right exists for the mosque to be built there. I believe that he is correct to do so, because that’s his job. Now there is news brewing that this is a perfect opportunity for the republican party, by blasting President Obama on this choice of his.

I submit that anyone who thinks such criticism of the president is reasonable is, by extension, declaring that the president’s job bears no relation what-so-ever to the laws of our country. Declaring that the president can act outside our laws, to the detriment of any particular religion, strikes to the very foundation of our country. And sacrificing our country is precisely what the republican party would be doing, if they choose such a course of criticism.

So, please take a moment to think through what I’ve written so far, then consider this. An attack against one religion in our country implies that no religion is safe. So, either the fact that the building is a mosque has zero bearing on its right to be built at the twin towers site, or you have zero rights in our country to worship your favorite religion, whatever it may be.

That’s the actual choice put before us.

A Not-so-quantum Leap

In short: I just registered for a course at Harvard Extension School.

So starts a long process, where, along the way, hopefully anyway, I manage to end my disability, therapy and generally feel good about myself again. For those that have been following along, no, this is not my gamble. This is a tentative first step, hopefully followed by more certain and sure steps, towards possible success with the gamble.

My current intentions are to take one course this fall, two next spring, apply for their degree program and finish with a Masters in Information Technology a couple years later. Perk, I’ll get to walk in the Harvard Commencement when I get my degree (pause here a moment to allow my parents to calm down).

I must admit, as I waited for HES’ registration to open for the fall courses, I felt some trepidation. Will I have the nerve to sign up? Of course I will, I thought, the hard part is actually going. I also paid for it, so this experiment, this test of myself as it were, is expensive. I’m doubtful of receiving any financial aid along the way, but I’m not concerned about that. It’s all about the commitment, the follow through, the interaction with others, being comfortable there as myself (as if those four items were all just one concept).

I don’t feel like I’ve done anything that’s a big deal. I know it’s important, significant, life changing. It’s also taking a course at university, which I’m good at, based on previous, now ancient, experience anyway.

I feel good about this.