In case my future self forgets what happened in the first quarter or so of my freshman year of high school, I will write this down. It’s also for people who are reading this post for any reason 😜
MP1 has just ended last Friday (11/19/2021). I ended with all A’s without any difficulty except in biology – we had a teacher that graded our lab reports really hard and gave us hard tests, which I appreciate. I ended with a 90.56% overall grade with a 90.0% average for the assessment/labs portion. The rest of my grades were all high A’s too, which I feel kind of proud about. And surprisingly, I ended with 100% in my Spanish 3 course, with 100% across all five categories under it. I didn’t even get a point off any of my interpersonal or interpretive assessments.
In world history, we finally finished a book called 1493: From Columbus’ Voyage to Globalization written by Charles C. Mann. We were assigned quick writes, reading prompts and more in our reading journals and were supposed to discuss the book in “Socratic Seminars”. It was an interesting experience though most of the time I didn’t like reading it – it ate up a lot of my time and I wasn’t interested in history either. I took honors for the course credits. 😅
I ended with a low A (93%) in that class and even discussed with my teacher why I had gotten 3 points taken off my reading journal (got a 90%) because I missed one thinking routine. I explained that I should get at least a 28/30 if every thinking routine was worth fifteen points. He replied that he didn’t think of it “mathematically” and that “I did not do everything”. However, even though I missed just one, I still put in the effort.
I mean, in my opinion, mathematics is so much better than world history. I hope my future self still agrees and drops history as soon as possible. (when graduation requirements are fulfilled for history).
The other classes were rather enjoyable but were relatively easy to get high grades in. I worked very hard in LA and was rewarded with several graded assignments with full marks. Math class was a complete joke to me as I already learned all of the stuff almost three years ago. Though this was true, it was rather enjoyable to help out my classmates with the work because I could see their thought processes by explaining why a particular formula works or why we should use one method instead of the another.
As for math life, I’ve done a lot of math competitions. I’m sure that I did not do well on the Fall AMCs but I got some decent scores on some math leagues like the NJML (5). Also, MMATHS 2021 was fun but it definitely could have been better if it wasn’t virtual. We rushed the relay packets too much (solved one worth 8 points though) and got a 6 in the individual round, which I presume isn’t too bad considering that I outscored more than half of our school’s B team.
I hope to get a restful Thanksgiving break after this busy month!