UW Update Sunday 3/29/15

1.     UW Update Sunday 3/29/15

a.     Don’t worry—a big backlog is in the works! Just wanted to get down an entry for today!

b.     Went on a Grandma Breakfast at Home Skillet. Had their enormous breakfast burrito, which was really good, but I think would have been perfect had I chose the creamy gravy to hold it together rather than the vinegary pork verde.

c.      Went on a walk with family behind Birchwood Park.

d.     Talked with Mom and Dad, packed, and headed for Seattle.

e.     On the way down, talked with Dad about a big idea he had to simplify the way user interfaces are built. Details proprietary!

f.      Grabbed dinner at EJ Burger.

g.     Returned to the dorm. Talked to Xin for a while, then went to the lounge and watched the end of a damning documentary about Scientology with the crew. Talked with Jamie for a bit.

h.     Returned to the dorm and went on my beginning-of-quarter cleaning and organizing spree. “Mopped” the floor with hot water, a sponge, and lots of paper towels.

i.       Wrote this log and went to bed.

UW Update Sunday Mar. 15

a.     UW Update Sunday Mar. 15

                                                 i.     The last Leroy push before spring break continues. I woke up, did some reading, and recorded a voice-over with Noah.

                                               ii.     Ate lunch with Issa. Returned to his room—besides his small tablet, he has a desktop computer, so it was most convenient for us to write our unschooling report and prepare our presentation there.

                                              iii.     Worked long into the afternoon. I wasted time writing up an outline of Free to Learn that I could reference. I think that time would have probably been better spent writing entries in the lit review.

                                              iv.     Took a Frisbee/Soccer/Basketball break with Issa in the McMahon gyms. Tried to pass two different types of catchable back and forth at once.

                                               v.     Returned to our studies. Worked on teaching outlines. Issa, frustrated with the artificiality of the assignments, began cranking out enormous amounts of production writing—which was good, because I was having a hard time doing that and spent too much time on things.

                                              vi.     Ate dinner, and again returned to Issa’s room. The work continued. I finished the second teaching puzzle.

                                            vii.     Issa went to bed to be rested for a math final, so I packed up and returned to my room.

                                           viii.     Made notes to set up my work for the following morning. Emailed first completed voice-over video draft to Dr. Walker. Set up final portfolio on honors portfolio website for education class, and collected paper notes for the “notebook” to complement online notes. Wrote this log and hit the hay.

UW Update Friday Mar. 13

a.     UW Update Friday Mar. 13

                                                 i.     Woke up and went straight to physics. I’m now two chapters behind on the reading, and unlikely to read them until after the unschooling presentation on Monday. Leeroooy…

                                               ii.     Had a really interesting class on light, EM waves (light, as far as I interpreted today’s class, is an electric field vibration that sets up a magnetic vibration that sets up an electric vibration that…, and the whole thing propagates through space). Talked about scattering of light in air.

                                              iii.     Returned to dorm. Figured out homework problem that had been bugging me.

                                              iv.     Went through the 100+ emails that had accumulated in my inbox. Sent out emails relating to voice-over recording for Cows.

                                               v.     Met with Diane from Cows and recorded a voice-over. It took a lot of time to get a usable outline and record, and I felt like the result was pretty disorganized, but the central themes were there, and the image is interesting.

                                              vi.     Ate lunch. Read more Free to Learn.

                                            vii.     Played some badminton with Xin.

                                           viii.     Returned to dorm, read more with some apples and peanut butter.

                                              ix.     Put on Glee Club stuff and walked to the University Presbyterian Church for our TA Stephen’s Graduate recital.

                                               x.     We did a short rehearsal, hung out listening to other groups rehearse. Some members were playing Smash Bros’ against each other on DSs, which looked pretty fun. I read this interesting article on more intuitive ways of working with math (not math education! Math as a tool) and this related one on programming. I joined 6 other people at Which Wich for dinner—we talked about classes and majors.

                                              xi.     Returned to church. The concert began. Some really neat music, including an Irish song sung by an advanced subset of the Glee club that I had been listening to. Sang our two songs, which went well.

                                            xii.     Returned to dorm and worked on unschooling presentation/paper. Read a bit of John Holt’s Instead of Education (he’s considered sort of the father of the unschooling movement) It was pretty interesting, and again, very hard for me not to agree with.

                                           xiii.     Wrote this log and went to bed.

UW Update Tuesday Mar. 10

a.     UW Update Tuesday Mar. 10

                                                 i.     I’ll keep it short, since I’m acutely aware that during Dead Week (at least this quarter), every second of blogging time comes straight from sleep J Woke up at 6:30 and spent the morning finishing the last mini-paper for Cows.

                                               ii.     After Cows, ate lunch at the HUB, then went to the McMahon music practice room and worked on perfecting a Glee Club song.

                                              iii.     Returned to dorm and did physics hw.

                                              iv.     Went to Glee Club. Dr. Boers is back, and with him, all our songs are sounding quite well indeed.

                                               v.     Grabbed a burrito at the 8 and read more Free to Learn for my unschooling project. Becoming more and more convinced that the entire domain of ideas about structured education is just completely wrong. Originally founded, as Peter Gray argues, in states’ and religions’ need to create deferent citizens and curb “natural rebellion”, compulsory school is broken in terms of motivation, basic psychology, and simple utilitarian happiness calculations.

                                              vi.     Returned to dorm, did more physics homework. Got derailed by trying to solve a differential equation related to the gnarly final postlab; waded through extensive computations on paper and Mathematica, and got nowhere.

                                            vii.     Walked off my frustration, came back, read more Freedom to Learn, figured out how to use my borrowed camera for voice-over recording for Cows, wrote this log, and went to bed.