Meals
- Breakfast – Hashbrown Sandwich, Sausage and Cheese Sandwich & Orange Juice
- Lunch – Porkchops with fries, green beans, and gravy & Lipton Raspberry Ice Tea
- Dinner – Hamburger with fries & Lipton Lemon Ice tea
Weather
- Beautifully sunny. The parks were full today with people lying on the grass and relaxing.
The Happenings
I’ve been waking up a bit later each day so I left the dorm at around 8:40am. As usual, I popped in my headphones and walked to the QMU. I downloaded the finale of Mahler’s 2nd Symphony (which is 17 minutes long), and listen to it during my morning strolls to breakfast. The choir makes the finale very calming and epic and it’s a great way to start the morning. However, I think I might change the song each week to get some variety in my mornings.
The first part of our school day was going over the tutorial questions. Lots of us were confused on how to draw free body diagrams and how to properly identify all the forces acting on a body. We never formally learned what tension was so some people had trouble with that. My group also got confused about the normal force and that it does not always equal the weight of the object. We fleshed all this out with Ruben but it got a bit slow at times. It reminded me of Math 252, when we would sometimes get so bogged down that we fell into downward spiral that was hard to recover from. We only got through 5/6 of the problems but I think we all gained a pretty firm grasp on free body diagrams and how to identify what forces were acting on a body and how to manipulate Newton’s 2nd Law to switch between forces and kinematics.
After lunch we had our wonderful lab. I heard from previous groups that the lab involved a lot of troubleshooting and it was a time crunch to finish on time. The first thing we do in lab is talk to Pedro about how we feel about the coursework and content. Many students gave mixed responses, explaining how they felt that there was not enough guidance to check if they were learning the material correctly. For instance, there are slews of multiple choice questions released but there is no answer key for them. The solutions will be released on Friday morning (hours before the exam), and that does not sit well with some people in our session. However, Pedro merely explained that the process works as nobody has failed this course and that we should be having doubts about the material – it’s how we learn more because we are rigorously thinking about the concepts.
I have an epiphany that this course is basically like the math curriculum I saw at the UCLA Lab School. Teachers would lead a group warm up to facilitate thinking and then give worksheets for students to do in groups, only offering guidance when students were really stuck. I was impressed at their collaborative effort and their ability to share their thought process while solving the problem and I have to say, they are much more proficient with math than I was in 3rd or 4th grade. So maybe everything will work out in the long term and what we’re experiencing right now is the adjustment to a different subject and teaching style.
Anyway, the lab ends up being a huge time crunch. Pedro spent 30 minutes talking to us and then gave us the lab specs, which basically provided no guidance at all. All we were supposed to do was analyze our roller coaster video in physics tracker to obtain data points to calculate the acceleration of gravity. However, this is our first time using this program and we all needed TAs to help us on a small group basis. It basically wastes 10-15 minutes of our time when they could have told us how to use the program before they broke us all into groups. In addition, we had to analyze the video we took for the roller coaster lab, but only videos that clearly showed the ball accelerating down the constant slope were sufficient to use. Well guess what? My group didn’t record a video with that reference because the directions never instructed us to. Thankfully our neighboring group shared their video with us but it just adds to the frustration and messiness of what should have been a simple process.
Then we have to analyze data and create graphs using excel. I consider myself proficient in excel but I’ve never made a graph with it. So much for the learning curve. The directions are simple enough but it is the unfamiliarity with the programs that cause this lab to become complicated. Oh, and we were timed too. Everything had to be turned in by 5:00pm. Stress levels were a bit high in the room but thankfully everyone finished (I think. . .). In my opinion, Pedro wasted a lot of our time and didn’t really reassure us. We told him our concerns and he basically refuted them and said that the system worked. Ya, that’s great to know but it didn’t really help anyone.
I crashed for two hours after dinner and began the grind for tomorrow’s test. I studied from 9:00pm – 1:30 am with some breaks in between. I did some book sample practice problems, reviewed tension and weight, rediscovered why a person accelerating up in an elevator feels heavier, and reviewed 60 multiple choice questions. I wasn’t tired at 1:30 and I really wanted to watch the second democratic debate so I stayed up to watch that and fell asleep at ~4:00am. I think it was worth it and it was a fun but sometimes cringey debate to watch. All in all, it was a long day and it felt like I did so much, yet accomplished so little. It was truly a Sisyphean day.
P.S. I encourage all of you to google Sisyphean if you don’t know what that means. I first encountered the word in one of my History 2C required readings and I immediately added it to the cool words list I wanted to use. A bit off tangent, but other words on this list include “buttress” and “fatalistic.”
