Computer Science I

For my Computer Science I course, I was in the same large auditorium that I had my Chemistry class in, which meant I spent a lot of time in that room. Just as I can't remember a lot of specific things from my American History class, having had so many classes in it, I've taken a lot of programming classes, so it's hard to remember where one ended and the next began.

I do remember a lot of late nights in computer lab down in the basement of the library trying to get my programs to work. I felt the pain and frustration of repeated failures, followed by the rejoicing that would inevitably come when the program finally worked properly.

I remember being amazed by the video our professor showed in class about the making of Toy Story. Here was this fully animated feature film that paved the way for the movies we see today (although if you trace backwards, you'll find Tron paving the way for Toy Story).

I remember taking tests by writing code on a piece of paper to be hand graded by a grad student, an experience many fellow students and I would repeat throughout several other CS courses, until I led my programming team to develop a system for facilitating computer-based testing and grading of student code-writing abilities in a proctored testing center I managed when I worked in the CS department.

One of the coolest things our professor let us do is see what our grade was without taking the final and decide if we wanted to attempt it or not. If we chose not to, there was no penalty. If we chose to take it, you could possibly have your grade go up or down depending on how you did on it. Gambling for grades. I chose not to take it.

Principles of Chemistry

After my AP classes in high school, the first real college course I took was Chemistry. One of the most important things I learned in this class was not to sign up for early morning classes. I guess if you go to bed at a reasonable time, it's okay, but what freshman living in the dorms goes to bed before 1 a.m.? I actually did go to bed early one night, only to find my roommates sneaking into my room with a bowl of warm water. They didn't succeed with their prank, since I hadn't fallen asleep yet, but I had learned the lesson. Stay up late, even if it means you sleep through your early morning classes.

My professor was Scottish, and his TA who taught one day a week was Asian. I had a hard time understanding both of them. The class was in a huge auditorium, which got less and less full every week as people dropped or stopped attending.

Welcome to college.

Spanish and Computer Science

To wrap up the AP classes that I took, I have to touch on the AP tests I didn't take. I passed all the ones I attempted, but I didn't attempt the test for all the classes I had taken.

I mentioned the Physics Electricity and Magnetism tests which I declined to take. I simply didn't feel prepared enough and figured that having already passed the regular Physics test, that would probably get me as far as I needed to go for general education purposes.

I actually dropped Spanish. In New Jersey I had signed up for an optional early morning Spanish class in junior high, which gave us a jump on the language, since you normally started studying foreign languages in high school. My Spanish teacher my freshman year of high school had an advanced degree from a university in Spain.

After moving to Utah, my teacher's experience included going on a 2 week vacation to Mexico once. Having had three years of Spanish classes, I was excited for AP Spanish to begin, until the first day of class when she started teaching us the alphabet. I thought it was ridiculous that she would do that, since there were prerequisites for the course. I was even more stunned to find that the alphabet refresher was actually needed, because there were people in the class that didn't know it. Between the alphabet experience and finding out that maybe two people from our school had passed that test in the last decade, I figured I'd be better off not wasting my time. Two years would pass before I took another Spanish class, and I picked right up where I had left off (unlike Calculus).

Computer Science was a great class. I learned a lot about the logic of computer programming, building a solid basis for several other programming classes I would take in college. I just didn't feel prepared to take the AP test, so I didn't.

Calculus

Calculus is one of those things that takes awhile to wrap your head around, but if you put in the work, it starts to open the world for you. The problem is that the second you stop maintaining your advanced math skills, it all goes away, and you realize you wasted a lot of time learning something you'd forget quicker than it took you to learn it.

I'm sure there's some change in the brain that remains long after you've forgotten everything you once knew about calculus, which makes it all worth it. I just can't prove it and have no desire to. I subscribe to the movement that statistics is more useful to more people, thus should be taught in place of calculus, even though many people are as scared of stats as they are of calculus. Engineers and others requiring advanced math can study calculus if they need it. We would all do well to know a little stats.

But this is about calculus, so I'll save the stats rant for later. My AP Calculus course was taught by a guy who had been teaching at the same high school since my dad became part of the first class when the school was formed 30 years previously. He was old school. Our administration declared that unlike some of our rival schools who banned hats, they would only follow when it was shown that hats prevent learning. Well, except if your calculus teacher bans hats from his own classroom. There were a lot of hat heads in there.

We had to learn to juggle. It was required. I don't remember if there was a penalty for not doing it, but it was required, even if you had to juggle pieces of tissue paper. I got decent at it as my friends and I practiced. Juggling was always a good diversion from a particularly hard problem, and it was okay, since it was a required part of the class. At the end of the year when it came time to show off our talents, our teacher brought home the object lesson that you can do hard things if you just work hard at it. Then he proceeded to tell us that he couldn't juggle himself. Oh.

A couple classmates had written an awesome program on the TI-85s that we used in class, and which we were allowed to use on the AP test, that automated almost everything you needed to do. I actually had my own graphing calculator that I used, a Sharp, I believe. I was used to mine, so I used that primarily on the test, but they allowed me to bring one of the loaded TI-85s as well, so I actually used two graphing calculators during the test. It worked out, and I got a 5 on the test, the highest of any of the AP tests I had taken.

English Literature

Near the end of my freshman year in high school, my English teacher asked me if I wanted to be in Honors English the next year. I didn't know or care what that was, so I said no. I didn't realize the alternative was Druggie English.

After a disastrous waste of sophomore English, where I received credit for reading Frog and Toad are Friends onto a tape as my friends discussed the scholarly classics A Tale of Two Cities and Wuthering Heights (neither of which I have read to this day), I accepted the challenge of Honors and then AP English the next two years.

In preparing for the AP test, we read classics such as 1984, Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies, and Heart of Darkness. The teacher had a policy that one could skip her final (yes, she still had a final, in spite of also having to take the AP test), if you got something published or won an award of some kind for your writing. I placed in the Utah State Poetry Society contest with a sonnet I wrote named Simple Things.

More interesting than my prize-winning sonnet was another poem I wrote about our teacher, which I now present to you:


The Demon Queen

The light of the new day breaks slowly over the horizon.
As alarm clocks are hit over and over all over the valley,
For just ten more minutes of sleep,
One Demon-Fiend arises ready for the new day to begin.

Teeth gnash one with another, and the jungle hair
Of the beast is pulled from the eyes
To reveal a sinister gleam, a glare, a terrifying gaze.
The Demon-Fiend is ready to capture her victims.

As she travels to the place of hunting,
The evil beast plans the first trap.
Hah, laughed the creature, No one can escape me!
I shall destroy all those who come near my path!

The cruel plan is so fiendishly clever in its intricacies.
I shall lure my soon-to-be victims into thinking
That I am their friend. I shall make them work for me,
But still think that I am working for them.

When they are fully enveloped in my power,
I will move in for the kill. I will destroy their hope.
I will shatter all their trust in others, but
They will still work to gain my favour.

When those hopeless wrecks of human beings are laid to rest,
The fiend will pretend to mourn,
But only to pull others within her grasp.
It is a never-ending cycle of target, capture, destroy, move on.

As the Demon retires for the night from a hard day of hunting,
She is constantly planning new devices of beguilement.
To weaken them, I shall have my fellow demon-creatures
All attack them at once, when they least expect it.

In their time of feast celebration, when all should be joyful,
I shall gather together my legions, and surround my victims.
When they are covered on all sides, they will be forced
To turn to me. I shall use them for my gain, and discard them.

The night slowly falls upon all the land.
A precious few are still awake, trying to thwart the plans of
The Evil One. There must be a way, they reason, but
There is no hope. A faint cry echoes, Nona Eleison.

Our teacher was pretty intense, and we were reading some pretty intense content (although I lucked out not having to read Beowulf that year), so I wonder if she had a large collection of anonymously written works about her slid under her door like the above poem was. I wonder if she knew I wrote it. I wonder if she knew what it meant. There is reference to the large paper due right after Christmas break and the fact that her large papers were often due right when big projects in other classes were due. Then there was the jungle hair. I don't know how to describe it, but there was always a claw in it. This is not the traditional Utah/Idaho claw (if you've seen it, you know what I'm talking about), but it was a claw nonetheless.

Physics

What can I say about Mr. Jackson and Physics? Wow, there may be enough to write a whole book. I don't even know where to start with him. For someone who didn't know him, I might explain the phenomenon that was Mr. Jackson as similar to the Kinetic King on the current season of America's Got Talent. Take ultra nerdy and mix in stuff blowing up, and you have an exciting show. Unlike the Kinetic King, who is probably the nicest man in the world, Mr. Jackson mixed in a dose of mean, but I think we all knew deep inside he was mean because he loved us and wanted us to succeed. Very deep down. And well disguised.

The AP class actually required an introductory physics class as a prerequisite, but to get around that, they taught both the introductory and advanced class simultaneously. My school had an A/B block schedule, where you'd alternate attending your A classes (periods 1-4) and B classes (periods 5-6) every other day for twice as long as a normal class. It could get tedious, because you were in the same class for an hour and a half or so at a time, but it could be nice, since you were always guaranteed at least two days to do your homework. Not with physics, though, since that was held every day.

The classroom was filled with Van de Graaff generators, magnets, hydrogen and oxygen tanks, batteries, and machines to move balloons around en route to being blown up. We sent an electrical charge from a generator through the whole class, holding hands, to the last two class members who held their fingers over a Bunsen burner and lit it with the spark that jumped between their fingertips. We blew up countless hydrogen balloons by calculating where the balloon would be at the exact moment a flaming ball would be catapulted across the room. To add excitement, Mr. Jackson would put on these old Sousa march records so they'd blow up to Stars and Stripes Forever and other great songs.

Each year the physics assembly was one of the most popular events. There was lip syncing behind huge Fresnel lenses, freezing all sorts of things in liquid nitrogen, and many more fun demonstrations, capped off by blowing up hundreds of hydrogen balloons in the dark to John Philip Sousa.

We made shirts with Mr. Jackson's face on the front and his wacky sayings on the back and wore them to the Physics Day competition at Lagoon, the local amusement park. We would send 20 teams to compete and gather around the single team of the most nerdy students the other schools could find, wearing our matching shirts and cheering each other on.

I took the Electricity and Magnetism class the next year, because I loved physics so much, but it was hard enough that I decided not to take the E&M AP tests, in spite of easily passing the regular AP Physics test the previous year. He inspired me to be an engineering major in college; that only lasted my freshman year before I moved into business, but the impression he left was lasting.

American History

My junior year of high school, I followed up my success of passing the European History AP test by taking the American History course. I have to say the teacher was not quite as dynamic or interesting as my first AP teacher, other than the fact that she looked like Alice Cooper. I say that in a loving way now, although it may have been less loving when we said it at the time.

She actually did know her stuff and did a lot to help us prepare, including several after school study sessions to prepare for the big test. She had essay questions from old versions of the test she would have us practice answering and grade us according to a similar rubric.

To tell you the truth, I don't remember a ton about the content of the course, probably because being American History, it blends in more with the history I've learned all my life, where the European History class covered material that was quite different than what I'd learned anywhere else.

The way the test is set up is that you get a multiple choice section and three essays. If I remember right, one essay was required, and for the other two essays, you could pick among three different questions for both. One of the questions I answered had been almost exactly the same as one our teacher had just barely covered with us in a practice test session, so we were all excited to see that question.

The one I still wonder about to this day is the third essay. I didn't write it, yet I still passed the test. I didn't know anything about any of the three possible questions. I wrote not more than about 5 or 6 words, not even in a complete sentence, as tangential topics or themes related to one of the questions. Maybe the third essay counts less, since they figure you might run out of time when you're working on it. Maybe I did so great on the question our teacher had just covered. Maybe I aced the multiple choice questions. Maybe...it was a miracle. I don't know.

European History

As I finished PhD coursework awhile ago and am working toward my dissertation, thinking back on some of the classes I've taken over my illustrious college career, two thoughts come to mind. First is the quote from Tommy Boy, "You know a lot of people go to college for seven years", followed by Richard's retort, "I know; they're called doctors". I'll soon enough be a doctor, but the kind that doesn't help people. Second, I wondered if I could remember my teacher, something I learned, or anything at all about every college class I had.

That seems like a tall order, since I've taken close to 90 classes over the last who knows how many years. So I thought it would be interesting to blog something about every college class I've taken. To start off, I took several AP classes in high school, and since those show up on the college transcript, I'm counting them.

The first college class I ever had was European History, my sophomore year in high school. I wondered what I was getting myself into when receiving an assignment to write a paper about the book Ivanhoe over the summer. I like to read, so that much wasn't a huge problem, but analyzing the development of chivalry was probably a bit beyond most of us at the time. I doubt there's any way to find the paper I wrote. It was probably as good as anything the average freshman might hand in, that is to say, not very good, but a good way as a teacher to quickly get a feel for the students in your class.

It was a difficult class, yet entertaining. It provided a lot of background for many parts of my life. I have to wonder if they still cover as much religious content in the class as they did when I took it, but I would think they would have to. So many major events going back several hundred years to a thousand years ago were so highly influenced by the church, that it is impossible to recount the history without including it.

We learned about everything from the Great Schism, to protestant reformers such as Martin Luther and his 95 Theses, to the dysfunctional royal families of England (okay, most countries, not just England), to the contrasting doctrines of transubstantiation and consubstantiation.

Various political terminology was covered in the class, with the naming of conservative and liberal political groups being based on the French National Assembly, where the differing parties sat in the right and left wings of the chamber, respectively. Related to this legislative body, not to go into all the details, would be the storming of the Bastille, which happened on my birthday in 1789, and the beginnings of the process to dismantle the system of nobility and create a constitution.

Most memorable, for better or worse, may have been watching Month Python and the Holy Grail after the AP test was over. Hey, once the test is done, it's a party until the end of the school year, right? I made some great friends in that class that would last throughout high school and beyond.

Bubble Guppy Analytics

I haven't watched much Nickelodeon since the days of Double Dare and You Can't Do That On Television. I'm slightly intrigued by a cartoon that is in its first season on the well know kids' channel. I actually don't know anything about the show, but Google somehow thinks, or at least one day thought, that my blog is somehow related to Bubble Guppies.

I was just looking around in my analytics and found that a couple weeks ago, someone from Ontario visited my site after googling Bubble Guppies. They were sent to my main blog page, not to a specific post. I have no idea what could have been the draw, other than perhaps a recent post that mentioned swimming in a couple triathlons. I wouldn't think that the mere mention of swimming would be enough to pull in a search for information about preschool-aged cartoon mer-people.

By writing about it now, I am, of course, taking the risk of forever linking my blog to the cartoon like I did with the website Surf the Channel in a post a few years ago that still gets me hundreds of hits every month for no good reason. So to the potentially hundreds of you that may visit in the future, if you actually read all three paragraphs of this post, leave me a comment and let me know what you were looking for when you found this and perhaps an interesting fact about yourself. Don't be afraid that you'll be revealing too much, as I already know quite a bit about you just by your visiting (for example, my unknown visitor from Ontario was using Google Chrome on a 22 inch widescreen monitor over Rogers Cable). And yes, every other website on the internet knows at least that much, if not more, about you when you visit them, especially if they integrate Facebook plugins to their site.

Expectations of Quality

Behold the smartness of Logan City road crews:

zoom in if you don't see it
We all make mistakes, and some like the one above are more easily corrected than others.

It makes me wonder what kind of expectations of quality the road crews have of themselves. We would all do well to think about the expectations we have of our employees, coworkers, and bosses, not to mention the expectations they have of us. If everyone does not set the bar at the same level, the tension can build quickly. Having a work environment where it's safe to fail, balanced with high expectations of each other, will lead to learning experiences. Ultimately the learning experiences will lead to higher quality outcomes if the team can stay in sync. Set the bar too low or get out of sync of the expectations of others, and you end up with the stereotypical "government job" and results like the above.