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Every year after president’s day, our school has a week dedicated to “Agora Days”. The idea behind it is to let our classmates teach us a class about any topic that doesn’t have to be related to school. Some popular ones are “Crazy Milkshakes”, “Ultimate Frisbee”, etc. This year I decided to teach a class about using basic python in game development.  We were making a retro single player video game, space invaders, into a 2 player game. I didn’t think I would have been able to do it by myself, so I asked one of my friends to co-teach it with me. We started preparing for it about 2 months in advance, meeting once or twice a week about learning what we were going to teach, making schedules, and revising plans. We had to create 2 different schedules, and we had to change the code we were going to give them 4 times. We also had to create 2 documents describing how to download some software before even meeting our students for the first time. This process gave me a good insight into how work-intensive being an educator can be. The week before our classes, we were on calls for hours each day to prepare and be ready for anything that could go wrong.

And finally, the day was here. It was time to use everything that we had been making to have the best experience possible for our students. On the first day, we had planned to focus on introductions and troubleshooting the software installation and make sure the initial (single-person game) code we provided was working. However, plans changed when we found out that everyone’s code was working and running smoothly. It was good to see that our instructions were in-depth enough for people to get them right without live help, but the bad thing was that we might not have enough content to cover the four one-hour classes. As we moved forward in the week, we had to go slower than we would have liked, but we still were not going to use all of the days we had. So we improvised and used the last day as a day for them to customize their programs and use what they had learned for the past 3 days.

Because we only had 4 days for the entire camp, we had to help them along the way, but it seemed like overall they had a good understanding of how the different parts of the code worked. It was a lot of fun to see what they had achieved in a mini showcase at the end of the last class. Agora days was overall a really enjoyable week, and I think I’m going to teach another class next year.

Another one of the scenarios that I particularly enjoyed was “What would happen if a baseball was thrown by a pitcher at the speed of light?”. This is another completely absurd question that will never happen in real life, but that is the charm of this book. He goes from burning the air in front and behind the ball to making a nuclear explosion that can flatten a city. And he explains all of this with great humor that makes you want to keep reading more.

I would strongly recommend this book to people who like science and other physics-based things, but I don’t have that much of a background in either of them and I could understand the topics fine. I would also recommend this book to people who like funny books and want to read other things rather than just regular novels. I would rate this book a 9/10 because everything from the writing to the drawings and just the humor was great, but to the less experienced person in the science and math fields, some of the formulas that he uses to find the answers to these questions can get confusing. Other than that, this is probably the best book that is not a regular novel I have ever read.

As many of you know, there has been a myriad of controversial things happening since the summer, and I wanted to make a short summary of everything that has been happening around us for the past few months. This isn’t one of the topics that particularly interests me to write about, but I feel like I needed to put something out there about what has been happening over this extremely turbulent year.

Starting off in June-July, the BLM (Black Lives Matter) Protests started happening in response to growing police brutality after the death of George Floyd. I completely agree with those protests, as the officer that killed this innocent man knelt on him for 8 minutes while the others kept witnesses from interfering. In response to this, police stopped the protests with brute force, ramping up the protests even more. Most of these protests were non-violent, but some people thought they were dangerous so some citizens were bringing out guns on these nonviolent protesters.

Moving a few months on, the campaigns for both Donald Trump and Joe Biden were in full flow. Obviously, COVID exists during this time, so it was harder for some people to congregate together. Biden reduced his public talks to a minimum, and when he had to, masks were always mandated. Some of his speeches were also done on a stage with people staying in their cars listening and social distancing. The sitting president, Donald Trump, was hosting speeches without mask mandates and people were not social distancing, causing each one of these events to become a super-spreader. This is when a big group of people are in the same place without adequate distancing and masks. One result of these are increased numbers of COVID cases. This also creates a bad example for the rest of the country. It makes the case that “if the president is doing it, why can’t I?”. But if we all did these kinds of events on a much smaller scale in our homes, the cases and deaths would skyrocket like they are doing right now.

Going forward a few more months, we find ourselves at the end of November and also right before the presidential election takes place. Because of the pandemic, many of the votes being counted were early votes, meaning it would take time for them to reach the vote-counting locations. This resulted in the election taking almost 4 days to have a distinct winner, Joe Biden from the democratic party. This would have been a closed matter, but Mr. President wanted to pursue his belief that the election was rigged and the votes were altered and removed during the mailing process of the early votes. He took this thought to the supreme court, and then eventually lost the case on the 6th of January, when congress counted the members who agreed and disagreed to the fact that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Trump also sent out a statement finally saying that he lost the election and he was only arguing the results because he was concerned with the future of U.S. Elections.

And now, in the present day, Twitter has pemanently banned Trump’s account, and Facebook has suspended it until the end of his term because of planning the recent attack on the capitol building. Saying it was a “heinous act”, and “treason on our democracy” were his words to try to save himself from some of what is coming to him after his presidency.

Thanks for reading this more serious post on my blog. I hope you enjoyed, and let me know in the comments if you want more things like this rather than the usual topic I write about on my website. See you next time!

A few days ago, my dad, sister, and I went skiing in Wilmot, Wisconsin. It was a great experience for all of us besides the fact that we had to wear masks all the time due to the pandemic. It is a three and a half-hour drive from our home in Champaign, IL, so we had to get up early on the day we were leaving in order to get to our lesson before it started. At around 7 in the morning, we packed up our things and got into the car. We had to wear three layers the entire time during the car ride as we would have no time to change before getting to the slopes. One downside of the particular ski slope we decided to go to was that there were a lot of people in line to rent skis and buy their tickets, so we had to stand outside in the cold for a while before actually getting on our skis.

As I said, this was my first time ever going on skis down a significant slope, so I was scared at first, but eventually, I realized how fun it was to control my skis and go wherever I wanted on them (in the snow). For our first lesson, we just went on a small slope and learned the more technical things about skiing, like properly falling and how to put our skis on the right way. We also learned about things like the risks of skiing, and how to walk up the side of a slope on skis without sliding down. After trying this on a small hill in front of the slopes, we went up on the lift for the first time. I was extremely nervous about going up for the first time, and it stopped in the middle to make it even worse. But as we went into the second day, I got more used to it and less scared of falling off. The first one we went down was the easiest one, but also the most fun because of all the curves and bumps on it. At first, I didn’t know how to turn or stop at all, but over the two days we were there I caught on pretty quickly. After the lesson was over, we stopped for lunch and then continued skiing by ourselves until it was too dark outside. At night, we got some pizza and a dessert to have in our Airbnb.

The next morning, we had to rush to pack up all of our suitcases and check out of our rental house before the lines got too long at the ski resort. Surprisingly, there weren’t nearly as many people as the day before. we got our boots on and headed to our second lesson. We repeated a lot of the things we did the day before, but we also learned more advanced things like other ways to stop, and how to turn more down the slope in order to reduce the speed. One problem we had was going too fast, and then not turning anymore. This is dangerous because you end up going 30-40 miles per hour at your fastest if you go straight down a big slope. After the lesson ended, we again went down the slopes on our own, but we progressed to going down a blue slope, which is the middle difficulty on ski slopes. these were much more fun, and we were going at higher speeds. We had some hot chocolate, and then we returned our skis and headed to the car for the three-hour car ride back home.

This was a heavily condensed version of our trip to Wilmot Ski Resort in Wisconsin, and we hope to go there soon again. It was a great experience, and I recommend anyone who likes sports and just moving around, in general, to go there for a few days. It gets tiring after doing it a lot for a few days, but if you go for 2-3 days as we did, it’s a lot of fun.

Thanks for reading this blog post, and see you next time.

We’re back yet again discussing how the year 2020 has affected my life. In the 2nd part of this “series”, we ended around the beginning of October.

This was around the time that we were all waiting for another break to start. October was 2-3 months after school started, and no one was enjoying school like they did in-person. There was one good thing at the end of October, Halloween. Obviously, we couldn’t go over to our friends’ houses and celebrate with them, but my sister and I went out with masks on our bikes to go collect candy. It wasn’t as fun as a normal Halloween, but it was still a great change from staying inside all day and being on our computers.

November was mostly the same because there was one event at the end of the year that everybody was looking forward to: Fall break. The entire month was pretty much the same thing over and over again every week. We also had to stop going to tennis because our state, Illinois, went into tier 3 of quarantine. This meant that things like bars, gyms, and recreational centers like the place I play tennis at had to close. So I started to go out with my friends on bike rides to outdoor tennis courts in the freezing cold weather. We had to find some way to keep playing and not waste the training we had gotten, and this was the only way. Obviously, we had masks on the whole time we were traveling, and we only took them off on the court. As the end of November came, one of my aunts arrived to visit my grandparents, and we had Thanksgiving dinner with her. We don’t actually celebrate it, but we use it as an excuse to cook and bake some delicious things once a year. We made cornbread, chocolate mousse, turkey meatloaf, and many other things. November ended, and things in our house went mostly back to normal. There is not a lot to say about what has been happening during these months, because everything was canceled and we were supposed to stay inside.

And finally, the end of December came, and the end of 2020. Around December 19, another one of my aunts came to visit us and my grandparents. It is always really fun whenever people come to visit us because we get to see them here instead of traveling in the car to North Carolina to see them. Again, my family doesn’t celebrate Christmas, but we take the time to give each other gifts that we have really been wanting for the past few months. It’s also time for our family to get together. We had to all wear masks while people were visiting, but it was fun nonetheless. We made food that we had never tried before, and all of it turned out amazing. New Year’s isn’t that big of a deal for us, and especially this year because we couldn’t go to any kind of party. We just all sat downstairs and watched the ball drop, and then watched a good movie.

And here we are! This was a recap of my entire year, from start to finish. It was definitely a new experience for all of us, and I hope that it gets better in the future with the vaccine being approved and cases starting to go down again (in my state, at least). I hope you enjoyed reading these past three blog posts. I will be posting again soon, so I’ll see you then.

Hello again! As promised, I’m back for more about how my year 2020 went. At the end of my last blog post, we were in the middle of my summer vacation.

This summer was probably one of the most boring 2 and a half months of my life. There was absolutely nothing to do because everything was shut down and no one could go out anywhere. However, one fun thing that happened during my break was going to my grandparents’ house for a few days. We could only stay there for 3 days because my dad had work going on at that time and he needed to teach some classes. Because my grandfather is 95 years old, we needed some way of getting him to our house. Normally, we would have taken him with us on a plane, but because of the Covid-19 pandemic, we couldn’t be sure that the other people on the plane were infected. We also couldn’t bring him in a regular car because that is a much too small space to be in. Thankfully, our friends who have an RV reached out and said they could use ours for our trip. This was a full-size RV, so it was very comfortable on the way there and back. it had 3 beds, and there was space for my grandfather to stand up once in a while. One downside of taking him in a car meant that we were going to have to take frequent stops rather than just stopping once or twice (which we did on the way there). Somehow, though, we managed to get home without having to sleep in the RV overnight. We had to make some accommodations for them before their arrival like rearranging their room for more space, but it was mostly simple. Nothing much happened after that during summer vacation, except when we were given the option to do either in-person or online school. But Covid foiled our plans again, and we were forced to go fully online again in August.

As school started, my peers and I immediately noticed the substantial increase in the workload from all of our classes. During the 2020 online spring semester, our governor ruled that we were not allowed to get graded on the letter scale anymore, and instead, we all moved to a pass-fail style of grading. This put much less stress on the students, and we all liked it better than getting A’s, B’s, etc. This change from no grading to more severe grading with more coursework than we would have had in person was a big shock to a lot of people around my grade level, in my school, and others. A lot of people were struggling to keep their motivation up because there was no way to physically turn in the work that we are assigned. By around the end of September, we all really wanted to go back to school but our administration had already announced that we weren’t going to go back to school by the end of the semester (now). the crazy part was that some private and Christian schools hadn’t even fully closed by then. Because the government has no hold over these schools, they were free to close whenever they wanted to. Things like these are reasons that the USA fell so far behind other countries in managing this virus.

We end this 2nd part of my official recap of 2020 at the beginning of October. Covid cases were spiking again with schools reopening, and it didn’t look like it was slowing down anytime soon. Little did we know, things were only going to get worse from there.

Thanks for reading part 2 of my recap of 2020! I hope you enjoyed reading this post, and I will be posting part 3 tomorrow, or in 2-3 days. There is also a post coming up soon about my first time skiing in a long time, so keep in touch. See you next time, and happy new year!

There’s no denying that this year has been one of the most devastating and unusual years of our lives for everyone with us right now, but there were also some good things that came with the bad. I this blog post, I’ll talk about how my 2020 went, and at the end, I will add a little bit about my winter holidays.

I’ll mostly skim through January and February because nothing much happened through those months. We had just finished winter break and no one was looking forward to going back to school after relaxing for 2 and a half weeks. I had just come back from traveling to North Carolina, so I was tired and really wanted to stay home for a few days to get back into the game. I also had tennis practice starting back up, and I couldn’t miss any more of those. My basketball season had just ended, and I wanted to get back in the rhythm of going to practice regularly with my friends or my coach. In February, I was used to going to school again, and the coursework at that time wasn’t too bad as we weren’t close to the midterms or the finals yet. At the beginning of March, everyone was finding out about COVID-19, but no one was worried about it yet. In the middle of march, my birthday rolls around, but this was also when our schools said that we wouldn’t come back to school for another two weeks after spring break. Everyone was overjoyed with this news because this meant that we got 14 extra days to do whatever we wanted with no homework to worry about. Little did we know, we would be out of school for so much longer.

When my school finally decided to go fully online around April we were all extremely sad, but we thought it would be fun to stay home for our classes for a month, and then when summer vacation comes, we would be back to seeing our friends and going out places without worrying about getting a deadly virus. Around summertime, COVID cases were actually going down in my area and most of the US as a whole. But as the three months of summer vacation dragged along, we realized that it would be a very long time until we would be able to go back to school in person and see our classmates and teachers. At this point, I was mostly just doing some extra work and volunteering in online camps. I also took a camp about python.

That’s the end of part 1! I hope you enjoyed reading about my 2020 experience, and the second part will be coming in a few days if not tomorrow. Come back soon for part two, and see you next time!

As you all know, there is a global pandemic going on, and that means kids cannot go to school right now. But there had to be some way to get us our education, so our schools turned to online schooling as a way to teach us from home. The pandemic started at the beginning of the year, so we left school around March 15, at the beginning of spring break. At that time, we just thought we were going to have 2 more weeks of spring break and certainly not 6 months of not seeing our friends and teachers. This meant that we have been learning at home for almost one whole school year. The sad part is that we might not even be able to go back to school until the next school year in August 2021. My experience with taking classes on zoom, the video meeting application our school uses have overall been pretty good, but being on the computer most of the day whether it is attending class, doing homework, and procrastinating can burn you out and make you lose motivation to participate and turn things in on time. One good thing about our schedule is that it’s now block scheduling, so our teachers get to teach us 1 hour every other day rather than 20-30 minutes every day. We also have a shortened school day that goes from 9 am to 2:15 pm, with a 30 minute lunch period in the middle. We have all of the regular classes, but instead, we have 4 on Monday, 4 on Tuesday, and we have no school on Wednesday. After that, it goes back to the same classes we had on Monday on Thursday and then the classes we had on Tuesday on Friday. Some subjects like English, French, and history are easy to learn online, because of the amount of out of class work you can do. However, classes like math and science which require in-person activity and participation are more difficult. For example, we had lots of labs for biology scheduled in class that we couldn’t complete at home. But for history, we are just assigned readings for homework and then we discuss them in class. We are just speaking to each other, so we don’t need to be next to each other or in the same room. Although I really miss seeing my friends every day, I also really like being able to wake up later than normal and then just change my clothes and click on a zoom link. At the start of the pandemic, none of us knew that it would carry on this long and get so bad. Through all of this, our education system has done a great job in transitioning to online learning, but there are still many things that we could improve on as quarantine continues into 2021, like less homework and being more in-depth in the topics that the teachers cover.

Thanks for reading this blog post about my 2020-2021 online school experience! Stick around for more posts about my everyday life and special events that happen to me. Until next time!

Starting Monday, I have been in a math camp called SIM camp set up by the University of Illinois. There are two camps hosted by this group of people every year, the one for younger students is Epsilon and the older students go to Delta. The first day of the camp was majorly introductions, icebreakers, and how to use the various technologies that we would use throughout the camp. Because of the pandemic that is happening around us, they had to do an online camp, instead of an in-person one. Therefore, some of the things that they had planned didn’t go as expected, but most of the things so far have gone pretty smoothly. After all of the introductions, we finally got to do the curriculum. First, we made Mobius bands which show that there are 3d shapes with only one side that aren’t a line. That was my personal favorite thing of the day. On the second day, we got more into the actual math and not just talking to each other. My favorite part of this day was learning about the mathematicians that we don’t necessarily talk about in our history classes. It drove home the point that mathematicians don’t have to be old, dead, rich white men. The first part of the day is called counting to infinity + 1, and the second part is called How To Draw Algebra. The first one is more general math, while the second is more focused on constructions.

That’s all for now, but I will keep posting about this camp as I have only been in two of the 5 days that we signed up for. Stay tuned!