Blog: Articles filed under myself

With the first term nearing its end, here’s a little review of my second year so far.

That is the best way to describe how I spend most of my time now. With three math classes, I spend nine hours a week listening to math lectures. I have three assignments due each week, so I work on those in my time between school and work. Every second week until the middle of November, I went to a practice sessions for math competitions for an hour on Fridays. Even when I’m not doing my own math, I like to help other people with their math. I am living and breathing math.

AND IT’S FRELLING AWESOME.

For those who don’t understand how someone can be so excited about math, the best way I can describe it is like being closer to God. I don’t necessarily believe in God, but I imagine that what I feel when I’m exploring mathematical concepts is the same feeling pious people get when they do whatever it is pious people do to feel closer to God. And math truly is the language of the universe. If God does exist, in one form or another, then understanding math helps one understand the universe and, in a way, get closer to God and creation.

When I first started university, I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to keep up. I had this deep, dark fear that I’d fail to understand crucial concepts and I‘d never be able to graduate in the math program. Fortunately, so far that isn’t the case. I am learning, and it is a challenge—some of these concepts are really complicated! But I build on what I learned before, and that allows me to understand concepts that a year ago I would have been unable to grasp.

The more I learn, however, the more I‘m able to comprehend just how much more there is I don’t understand yet. I‘m starting to get an idea of where my interests lie, however. I’m really enjoying ring theory—we’ll see if my interest continues next term, when we learn group theory. Abstract algebra appeals to me because it focuses on the reason I love mathematics. Abstract algebra involves constructing and proving the fundamental aspects of math. It’s the fundamentals of the fundamentals. I‘m discovering that I love doing proofs.

I’m getting the sense that most of my peers don’t have the same white-hot passionate love for math that I do. But that’s fine. I’ll show them. I’ll show them all! Muwahahaha! Muwahaha—er … right. Moving on.

When I tell people who know me that I want to teach high school, most of them react with scepticism. Apparently I walk around with the word “Professor” stamped on my forehead. Working for the first time with a new hire at the gallery, I made an allusion to Sisyphus, and my boss said, “Ben’s our resident Einstein.” And the new girl replied, “Yeah, I’m getting that vibe.”

Apparently I give off a vibe now….

I have wanted to teach for as long as I can remember. As I got older, however, the age group I wanted to teach got older as well. So I can’t deny that now that I’m in university, I‘m starting to understand why I would want to teach at a university. My main reason for not wanting to become a professor is that I don’t want to write math papers and do research into theories. I just wanted to do math. Now I‘m realizing that I actually like doing proofs, and it’s scary! :whoa:

Will I stick with my original desire to teach high school? Or will I fulfil everyone else’s predictions? Tune in for the exciting conclusion over the next three years!

Either way, I’m going to be a math hermit for a very, very long time.

It’s already been over a year since we moved into our new house. Since moving in, although I’ve been very happy with my room on the whole, I have wanted to do three things: get new curtains, get rid of the wallpaper, and paint the white walls.

Classes end next week, and my exams are over by December 12, which gives me a nice break before the start of next term. This is a perfect opportunity to paint my room. I need to do it soon, too, because I’ve already run out of space to shelve my books—and once I put up more shelves, they are never coming down.

Over the course of this year and a month, I‘ve adjusted to the curtains. I asked one of my coworkers (who is an artist, so I figured she could suggest some good colours) what I should do with the room, and she said she liked the wallpaper. It’s certainly not Mario wallpaper¹ … but then again, if I don’t tear it down, I only have to paint three walls, and I don’t have to take down one set of shelves.

So I’m asking for your help with these two questions:

1. Should I keep the wallpaper or tear it down?
2. What colour should I paint my walls (bearing in mind your answer to question 1)?

I‘m not very good with colour, so I appreciate any suggestions you have, whether it’s just a word or if you link me to a specific ID number or swatch. Here are some recent photos of my room so you can get an idea of how everything is laid out:

Thanks!

• [ 1 ] For those of you who don’t stalk me, I used to have Super Mario wallpaper on one wall of my room in my old house.

So I was going to write this entry in French, but I discovered along the way that I’ve forgotten my simple past tense. This disturbs me.

I took French from grade 1 until grade 11 in school (this was before the provincial government postponed mandatory French until grade 4). It’s only compulsory until grade 9, but I liked my teachers, and the courses were interesting and academic. Plus, being able to speak another language is a plus. Except I can’t really speak it now, can I?

Part of me thinks I don’t have an ear for languages. I excelled at reading and writing French. However, even at the height of my proficiency, I was never too hot at pronunciation or comprehension of spoken French. Nevertheless, I feel bad that I live in a bilingual country yet I only speak English. There’s this whole other culture that’s an integral part of my country’s history and current events, yet I ignore it. I feel like an elitist anglophone snob!

This week’s episode of Spark includes a segment about the French-English digital divide. That’s what got me thinking about this, although it was also tonight’s French-language debate amongst the federal party leaders. I recorded it, even though my French is rusty. Luckily I was able to catch the gist of what I watched—I didn’t watch it all, because it is rather long, and most of the issues will be covered again in Thursday’s English-langauge debate.

Of course, no amount of wanting my French to improve will magically make it improve. I‘d actually have to do something about it. My chances of doing this in my free time are virtually nil. Maybe next year, if it’s offered, I’ll take Lakehead University’s Elementary French course—it accepts my grade 11 French class as a prerequisite, and that will provide the classroom-directed motivation I need to re-engage myself in French. I guess I could also try reading for leisure in French. Maybe some Camus? I wonder if I could get my hands on Douglas Coupland in French…. :P

For those of you who speak multiple languages, what was your experience in learning languages other than your first? If you went through immersion (either in school or just by living in a different country), did you find that conducive or challenging?

I had a bunch of nifty blog posts planned for this week, but I didn’t have the time to write them. My weekend was chock full of work, followed by homework, leaving me with barely enough energy to drag myself to my computer, let alone write or write a blog post. This week hasn’t gone much better.

That’s not to say that I’m having bad days. I try not to start off my day dreading what is to come; it seems like the wrong attitude. Nevertheless, I do feel the pressure of a continuous flow of activities. I wake up, go to class, do homework, maybe read if I‘m lucky. I’ve been working a lot. To reduce the stress and impose some order on this managed chaos, I‘ve tried to establish as much of a routine as possible. Of course, things crop up that don’t submit to that routine, and those throw my day off.

I try to consciously stop and recognize those moments of stillness that happen between each scheduled activity. This afternoon I listened to Brahms while solving differential equations, and that was quite relaxing. Really, it was. No one else was home, so I existed alone in this pocket of classical music and mathematics (which are related, of course!). I knew that stillness could not last, unfortunately—I had to go to work. Worse, I had to work late, which means I had less time after work to 1) watch House and 2) do more math. Work did not last as long as it could have, fortunately. House was excellent—Felicia Day seems to be popping up everywhere since I saw her in Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. But now the night is over for me.

Hopefully I’ll be less tired toward the end of the week and next week. I wish I could stay up and work on ring theory, but I have an 8:30 class on Wednesday, and if I don’t go to bed, then I won’t get up in time. I’m already going to regret waking up at 7:30 anyway.

Let me begin by saying that I don’t support age rating of books (i.e., saying “this is for ages 8-12, this is for young adults, this is for adults…”). However, when you look at how we rate our other content by age, it seems hypocritical, does it not?

Games and movies receive official ratings that state whether or not the content of those products is suitable for a certain audience. Sometimes, the law enforces these ratings. That means if you’re under 18, you can’t get into an R-rated movie (without an adult). But you can go and buy a book that may have the same graphic scenes as an R-rated movie, and the cashier at the store doesn’t stop you. They don’t card you. (At least, they didn’t card me when I was under 18.)

Seems like we have a double standard here. I know, I know: books aren’t as “visual” as movies or games. Reading about mass violence or sexuality, reading a curse word, that isn’t the same as seeing and hearing it. Well I think that insults the average reader’s imagination. And even if it doesn’t compare to graphical depictions, wouldn’t a book’s descriptions, if done well enough, still be specific enough to scar immature readers? Should we continue to let unrated books be sold?! Where are you torches and pitchforks, people?

Luckily, since most children and young adults these days aren’t interested in reading for pleasure, we don’t have to worry about this crisis.

Every day I find myself becoming more of an autodidact whose primary goal is to propagate knowledge. Seems like a pretty worthy goal for a set of self-replicating DNA, no? After all, that’s all we—everything in the universe—are: information, in one form or another.

My thirst for knowledge is perhaps my most consistent trait as far back as I can remember. I loved and continue to love to read. When I first got MSN (because I was jealous of my younger brother), the next step I took was to learn HTML so I could create my own website. From there it … sort of snowballed (as this site evidences). The Internet is an autodidact’s dream: a nearly limitless, ever-updating source of information. Thanks to Google, Wikipedia, and the Oxford English Dictionary, I can learn the answer to most questions or the definition of a word (still not sure about that whole group of groundhogs issue, however). I read sites like Lifehacker regularly, learning about subjects as varied as technology to productivity to cooking. The Internet’s vast potential for education is enough to make me love it, despite of its drawbacks that some critics use to declare technology a destructive social mechanism.

And yes, asking about groundhogs was very weird. That’s me though. I ask weird questions because something comes up, and I want to learn it. I wouldn’t do well on a trivia show. Although I don’t consider any piece of knowledge trivial, my retention and recall just doesn’t work that way. It’d be cool if it did.

Yes, I love learning. I was the guy who always sat in the front of the class and wanted the rest of the class to stop talking so the teacher could continue. I was the guy who always had an answer—or question—and put his hand up, so eventually the teacher would say, “Does anyone know the answer—anyone except Ben?”

I‘ve changed my mind about buying books, too. Originally I borrowed the vast majority of my books from the library. I seldom read a book more than once unless I really enjoyed it. Now, because I’ve got a job and the money that goes with it, I enjoy buying books. I like giving them to people or lending them. I don’t care if that person reads the book. While I try to select books that I think my friends will like, ultimately, the act of giving is the crucial part. Even if my friend doesn’t read the book, maybe someone else will. If my friend does enjoy the book, and tells me, then that’s great.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is … every day, I am more inclined to read and learn. I can’t slow down. The clock is ticking until I die, and I have so much to know!

(P.S. Laura, I realize that this is the second time in two entries that I‘ve made you think during the summer. I’d apologize, but you‘d just tell me I didn’t mean it again. And you’re right. We only have so long to learn things, so go out there and think!)