Monday, September 27, 2010
My Haircut
So my hair has been getting a little long so a friend here and i found a barber. I thought the process would be pretty easy because i had pictures from when i arrived (they were taken for the visa process) and cutting my hair is not complicated. I told her just a little shorter on the sides and showed her the pictures. She picked up the clippers and said lets try this length. Then she cut a strip that was as short as the rest of my hair now. After that the only option was to just buzz it that length. All in all though i don't mind, it feels really good to feel the wind on my head now so i kind of like it. My friend who went after me learned from my experience and ended up with a haircut much closer to the one he was expecting.
Thursday, September 23, 2010
A lot to catch up on
Its been a long time since i posted a blog entry so this one is going to be pretty long. I didn't get a chance to post one last week because i was on a trip but my weekend just started so i have time to get this thing all caught up.
Exams
Last i had written i had just taken my exams so i am going to start off with how they went. I got both grades back from my physics exams one right after the other. The first was from the test i thought i had failed and it turns out i got a 74 which i was very pleased with. Turns out the two questions i did really bad on were really two parts to one question so it didn't hurt me as much. There were a lot of unhappy people in that class though i know a lot of people who failed. One guy had studied a ton, he apparently did every practice problem in the chapter (there are a lot) and he got just under 50. I found out the reason was that half the points of the test were tied into two sections of conceptual questions. Those sections required little to no math skills but made you apply some of the concepts we had learned to figure out how things act that we hadn't seen before. Those sections saved me and dominated my friends. Overall i was really happy. That test had been a worst case scenario for me and i still passed :)
Getting that test back put me in a great mood but when i got the test back that i thought i had done really well on i got a 70. Its hard to tell why i missed points and i'm still not totally sure. There were check marks next to the problems and then a 70 with a circle around it. I had heard that he had an arbitrary grading style but i was still surprised that he didn't actually show where i lost points. He invited us to come by his office and ask questions after we reviewed our tests. So far i have only reviewed the first problem and i got it wrong for an ironic reason. In Spanish the word for thousand is "mil" which always always always makes me think of million. Every time i read the word i think million and then correct myself (most other words i just understand by now). On the first problem one of the numbers given was 1 millón (million in Spanish) and i wrote it down as 1,000. I'm very curious how i missed all the other points because i thought i had done well and none of it seemed hard but i passed so i'm not upset about it.
Trip
We all got thursday and friday off because of the mexican independence celebration the week after exams. The international office here organized a trip that left tuesday night and returned sunday. Both of my physics classes are on tuesday so i could go on the trip without missing them which was perfect. The trip was a ton of fun but in many ways it was a comedy of errors.
The trip had just under 80 international students on it in all, we rode in two buses. The first leg of our journey was made overnight, we left at 10 pm and got in at 2 pm the next day to Guadalajara. There we toured a town called tequila where their primary industry is making tequila (as you might have guessed). We got to see the whole process from what the plant looks like to the vats where it all ferments. It was a really interesting tour. We celebrated mexican independence in Guatemala. There was a huge celebration in downtown. We were told that the main event started at 11 but it actually started at 10. By the time we got to where it was the entrances were all blocked off by military. There were smaller festivities and street vendors for about two blocks running around the whole main event though so we got to tour those and it was a lot of fun. We had to ask for directions a few times to find our way back to the hotel afterwords but we made it in the end. We visited a few artisan towns and lots of flea markets where people could buy souvenirs. I really enjoyed walking around in those and seeing the kinds of things that people make. Probably my favorite part of the trip though was a tour we took through an old silver mine in a town called Zacatecas. Apparently Zacatecas used to be one of the biggest exporters of silver in the world and the mine was huge. I had been expecting it to be a lot of cramped tunnels but it was actually huge and open. The ore was richest in a vein that ran almost vertical (maybe 10 degrees) down the mountain so that is the part they mined. Most of the tour we were walking along paths constructed after the mine closed and we could see a long long way up along the crack and down to water. The mine was closed when water found a path into it and flooded the lower levels. I learned a lot about how mining was done back then and was really impressed with how much had been excavated. At one point we ate in a diner where there was a live band, which would have been really neat but the band was close to us and really really really loud. It was kind of funny how bad the whole experience was, you couldn't hear yourself think. Also at two points on the trip our bus lost a tire but both times we just waited for a little while till it was fixed and then continued. The trip was also my first real experience with mexican lateness. In my school they are very very clear that people are expected to be at class on time. On this trip though we were almost always a half hour late in everything we did. It took some getting used to but once we understood the system it was fine. If we were supposed to meet somewhere at 9:00 we would just find a leader at 9:00 and make sure we arrived whenever they did. We figured if we didn't show up after the leaders we couldn't be late :)
One of the most interesting parts of the trip was seeing how students from different nationalities acted. The french chain smoked, and all of the Europeans drank a ton. They all drank constantly. The spanish tended to make a big deal out of problems on the trip and there was one pretty intense rant by a spanish girl about all the things that were wrong with the trip (she was talking to an organizer). Apparently the stereotype that people know here is that Europeans smoke cigarettes and Americans smoke weed. Some people take stereotypes of Americans to be really true. There were 4 of us (americans) on the trip and people always assumed that we were huge drinkers and partiers.
Last week
I thought last week was going to be bad because i was up really late sunday night doing homework. We were supposed to get back early evening from the trip but we lost a tire on the trip and didn't get into midnight. Usually if i don't sleep well sunday night i'm just tired all week, which i was, but it was also a great week largely because of the weather. It has definitely cooled off now, the highs are hovering around 87 but when its overcast its often in the 70's. The weather this week has been my dream weather for tennis. Its that temperature where if you slept outside with just a t-shirt you might get cold but its perfect for exercising. I really like playing in the mornings because of how cool it is, and the sun never gets in your eyes (its not up). Everything seems easier when i'm not hot. Its easier to sleep, i can get some homework done at home instead of finding air conditioning to do it all ect. This week has probably been the best one i have had here just because of that (i haven't had time to do anything fun). The only minor downside is that it has started to rain. I really don't mind the rain that much at all but it takes a while to dry once i am wet because of the humidity which can be annoying. Just as i am writing this rain has started outside in earnest and i just heard thunder. One day this week we had a torrential downpour for about 2 hours. I had not seen rain like that since being in florida, nothing like it exists in the northwest. I was exposed to it for about 20 seconds heading to class and i got completely drenched. Some of my notebooks in my backpack got a little wet but they shielded my textbooks which was great. When i got to my building i had to get a bunch of paper towels and dry off some and i was still dripping on absolutely everything when i got into the class (but so was everyone else).
Fitness testing
One day it was raining in the morning so instead of playing tennis we did fitness testing during tennis practice. I have never considered myself a good sprinter, i'm pretty good at running distances but i've always known that the average athlete can sprint faster than me, but i discovered that everyone on our tennis team is pretty slow. We did 10m and 40m timed runs and i won both by a pretty large margin. We also tested high jump which i was the highest in by a big margin again. I'm not trying to brag, we did these same tests in tennis at whitworth and i am an average jumper and an average sprinter at best. I was just really surprised that everyone here can be so good at tennis and not be very fast. After those tests though we tested for situps in a minute and i got dominated by every single person on the girls and guys team. To count you had to go from shoulder blades on the ground do elbows touching the knees and you were never allowed to move the arms. I got somewhere in the mid 30's and i was the only one there not to break 40. There is a workout routine that we all do three times a week and it has a lot of ab work in it. They have also talked a lot about the individual strength training they do on their days off. We never do any cario workouts at all which i always thought was strange but i guess they just focus completely on strength and it seems to be working for them. It was a funny practice because i discovered that i am easily the fastest and weakest person on the team.
RR
A very recent development is that i am learning to roll my r's! I have been practicing while i walk to and from school and just today i started to feel the flutter. I am still a ways from mastering it and i can't keep the sound going but i can definitely do it. My host mom says that once people get to this point it takes about a week to get the hang of it :)
Juice
One of my biggest discoveries since my last post was a juice drink sold in gas stations. I don't know why i had never tried it before, it is sold in every gas station here, i guess it just never looked appealing. It turns out that it is a pure juice drink, one of the ones where the drink tastes exactly like the fruit ("odwala" and "naked" type) but here a bottle costs 80 cents US! I try not to buy drinks here but now when i do i have something i really like that is healthier that coke. Some places do not sell water, which is really strange, so i'm glad to have another alternative. The juice is almost as cheap as water too, it costs 17 cents more.
Buying drinks has been a little strange for me here. In the us i always just get water with any food i eat but here water is never free, it is just as expensive as every other drink. I carry a bottle with me that i can fill up at home for free but it often runs out and on the trip i ended up having to buy anything i wanted to drink. The drinks are usually pretty cheap but it still all adds up. I like having interesting things to drink (i try to experiment) but it still feels weird to not be able to get water for free.
Anyway thats it. This seems pretty disorganized but it covers the most interesting things i can think of that have happened in the last two weeks. Thanks for reading!
Exams
Last i had written i had just taken my exams so i am going to start off with how they went. I got both grades back from my physics exams one right after the other. The first was from the test i thought i had failed and it turns out i got a 74 which i was very pleased with. Turns out the two questions i did really bad on were really two parts to one question so it didn't hurt me as much. There were a lot of unhappy people in that class though i know a lot of people who failed. One guy had studied a ton, he apparently did every practice problem in the chapter (there are a lot) and he got just under 50. I found out the reason was that half the points of the test were tied into two sections of conceptual questions. Those sections required little to no math skills but made you apply some of the concepts we had learned to figure out how things act that we hadn't seen before. Those sections saved me and dominated my friends. Overall i was really happy. That test had been a worst case scenario for me and i still passed :)
Getting that test back put me in a great mood but when i got the test back that i thought i had done really well on i got a 70. Its hard to tell why i missed points and i'm still not totally sure. There were check marks next to the problems and then a 70 with a circle around it. I had heard that he had an arbitrary grading style but i was still surprised that he didn't actually show where i lost points. He invited us to come by his office and ask questions after we reviewed our tests. So far i have only reviewed the first problem and i got it wrong for an ironic reason. In Spanish the word for thousand is "mil" which always always always makes me think of million. Every time i read the word i think million and then correct myself (most other words i just understand by now). On the first problem one of the numbers given was 1 millón (million in Spanish) and i wrote it down as 1,000. I'm very curious how i missed all the other points because i thought i had done well and none of it seemed hard but i passed so i'm not upset about it.
Trip
We all got thursday and friday off because of the mexican independence celebration the week after exams. The international office here organized a trip that left tuesday night and returned sunday. Both of my physics classes are on tuesday so i could go on the trip without missing them which was perfect. The trip was a ton of fun but in many ways it was a comedy of errors.
The trip had just under 80 international students on it in all, we rode in two buses. The first leg of our journey was made overnight, we left at 10 pm and got in at 2 pm the next day to Guadalajara. There we toured a town called tequila where their primary industry is making tequila (as you might have guessed). We got to see the whole process from what the plant looks like to the vats where it all ferments. It was a really interesting tour. We celebrated mexican independence in Guatemala. There was a huge celebration in downtown. We were told that the main event started at 11 but it actually started at 10. By the time we got to where it was the entrances were all blocked off by military. There were smaller festivities and street vendors for about two blocks running around the whole main event though so we got to tour those and it was a lot of fun. We had to ask for directions a few times to find our way back to the hotel afterwords but we made it in the end. We visited a few artisan towns and lots of flea markets where people could buy souvenirs. I really enjoyed walking around in those and seeing the kinds of things that people make. Probably my favorite part of the trip though was a tour we took through an old silver mine in a town called Zacatecas. Apparently Zacatecas used to be one of the biggest exporters of silver in the world and the mine was huge. I had been expecting it to be a lot of cramped tunnels but it was actually huge and open. The ore was richest in a vein that ran almost vertical (maybe 10 degrees) down the mountain so that is the part they mined. Most of the tour we were walking along paths constructed after the mine closed and we could see a long long way up along the crack and down to water. The mine was closed when water found a path into it and flooded the lower levels. I learned a lot about how mining was done back then and was really impressed with how much had been excavated. At one point we ate in a diner where there was a live band, which would have been really neat but the band was close to us and really really really loud. It was kind of funny how bad the whole experience was, you couldn't hear yourself think. Also at two points on the trip our bus lost a tire but both times we just waited for a little while till it was fixed and then continued. The trip was also my first real experience with mexican lateness. In my school they are very very clear that people are expected to be at class on time. On this trip though we were almost always a half hour late in everything we did. It took some getting used to but once we understood the system it was fine. If we were supposed to meet somewhere at 9:00 we would just find a leader at 9:00 and make sure we arrived whenever they did. We figured if we didn't show up after the leaders we couldn't be late :)
One of the most interesting parts of the trip was seeing how students from different nationalities acted. The french chain smoked, and all of the Europeans drank a ton. They all drank constantly. The spanish tended to make a big deal out of problems on the trip and there was one pretty intense rant by a spanish girl about all the things that were wrong with the trip (she was talking to an organizer). Apparently the stereotype that people know here is that Europeans smoke cigarettes and Americans smoke weed. Some people take stereotypes of Americans to be really true. There were 4 of us (americans) on the trip and people always assumed that we were huge drinkers and partiers.
Last week
I thought last week was going to be bad because i was up really late sunday night doing homework. We were supposed to get back early evening from the trip but we lost a tire on the trip and didn't get into midnight. Usually if i don't sleep well sunday night i'm just tired all week, which i was, but it was also a great week largely because of the weather. It has definitely cooled off now, the highs are hovering around 87 but when its overcast its often in the 70's. The weather this week has been my dream weather for tennis. Its that temperature where if you slept outside with just a t-shirt you might get cold but its perfect for exercising. I really like playing in the mornings because of how cool it is, and the sun never gets in your eyes (its not up). Everything seems easier when i'm not hot. Its easier to sleep, i can get some homework done at home instead of finding air conditioning to do it all ect. This week has probably been the best one i have had here just because of that (i haven't had time to do anything fun). The only minor downside is that it has started to rain. I really don't mind the rain that much at all but it takes a while to dry once i am wet because of the humidity which can be annoying. Just as i am writing this rain has started outside in earnest and i just heard thunder. One day this week we had a torrential downpour for about 2 hours. I had not seen rain like that since being in florida, nothing like it exists in the northwest. I was exposed to it for about 20 seconds heading to class and i got completely drenched. Some of my notebooks in my backpack got a little wet but they shielded my textbooks which was great. When i got to my building i had to get a bunch of paper towels and dry off some and i was still dripping on absolutely everything when i got into the class (but so was everyone else).
Fitness testing
One day it was raining in the morning so instead of playing tennis we did fitness testing during tennis practice. I have never considered myself a good sprinter, i'm pretty good at running distances but i've always known that the average athlete can sprint faster than me, but i discovered that everyone on our tennis team is pretty slow. We did 10m and 40m timed runs and i won both by a pretty large margin. We also tested high jump which i was the highest in by a big margin again. I'm not trying to brag, we did these same tests in tennis at whitworth and i am an average jumper and an average sprinter at best. I was just really surprised that everyone here can be so good at tennis and not be very fast. After those tests though we tested for situps in a minute and i got dominated by every single person on the girls and guys team. To count you had to go from shoulder blades on the ground do elbows touching the knees and you were never allowed to move the arms. I got somewhere in the mid 30's and i was the only one there not to break 40. There is a workout routine that we all do three times a week and it has a lot of ab work in it. They have also talked a lot about the individual strength training they do on their days off. We never do any cario workouts at all which i always thought was strange but i guess they just focus completely on strength and it seems to be working for them. It was a funny practice because i discovered that i am easily the fastest and weakest person on the team.
RR
A very recent development is that i am learning to roll my r's! I have been practicing while i walk to and from school and just today i started to feel the flutter. I am still a ways from mastering it and i can't keep the sound going but i can definitely do it. My host mom says that once people get to this point it takes about a week to get the hang of it :)
Juice
One of my biggest discoveries since my last post was a juice drink sold in gas stations. I don't know why i had never tried it before, it is sold in every gas station here, i guess it just never looked appealing. It turns out that it is a pure juice drink, one of the ones where the drink tastes exactly like the fruit ("odwala" and "naked" type) but here a bottle costs 80 cents US! I try not to buy drinks here but now when i do i have something i really like that is healthier that coke. Some places do not sell water, which is really strange, so i'm glad to have another alternative. The juice is almost as cheap as water too, it costs 17 cents more.
Buying drinks has been a little strange for me here. In the us i always just get water with any food i eat but here water is never free, it is just as expensive as every other drink. I carry a bottle with me that i can fill up at home for free but it often runs out and on the trip i ended up having to buy anything i wanted to drink. The drinks are usually pretty cheap but it still all adds up. I like having interesting things to drink (i try to experiment) but it still feels weird to not be able to get water for free.
Anyway thats it. This seems pretty disorganized but it covers the most interesting things i can think of that have happened in the last two weeks. Thanks for reading!
Friday, September 10, 2010
1 down, 3 to go & traffic
Exams
The way my school here organizes the year, every class gives 4 exams which end up being worth most of the grade. Last week was the first week of exams. Overall they went ok, i wont really know till i get them back. My worst exam by far was in E&M. I think the whole thing was a tragedy of errors in a way. I was pretty tired going into it and pretty stressed about it but i was confident in the studying i had done. The reason it went badly was that on one question i for some reason started to do the problem the wrong way (it still works, but the math is WAY harder) instead of the simple way. I spent quite a while trying to make the math work without any success and i was getting more and more frustrated. The question after that one also used the answer i couldn't get. In the end i just explained exactly how i would get the answer. My explanations weren't that great though because the test ended a half hour earlier than i expected. The test had 4 questions, the first one i definitely got right, the 2nd i felt good about but my answer at the end seemed strange so i might have made a math mistake somewhere. The third i never finished and the 4th i explained. I'm hoping the teacher gives partial credit so i pass. Overall i think i just need to get more sleep and relax before the next exam. The simple answer was something i had done 30 times or so and as soon as the test ended and the stress left i realized what was wrong (given 20 min i could have done it all after that). Doing badly on that test made me more nervous for my thermodynamics test but it went incredibly well. I had better timing on that test than any other test in my life. The professor told us to put our pencils down as i was boxing my last answer :) So all in all i had two tests that went ok but not incredibly (chem and society) one bad one, and one great one. I'm glad its over and i think i'm going to do a lot better in the next exam week.
Today
Today i got up for tennis, then had a group meeting for a presentation, did some homework, ate some food, went to the supermarket and bought a pineapple, some cereal, and some ice cream (as a reward) and now i am at home and about to go to bed and sleep as long as i can. It has been a really nice relaxing day which is great.
Traffic
It also occurred to me that i should talk about the culture and general observations instead of just saying what i'm doing. This time i want to mention how traffic works. The biggest and most obvious difference is that pedestrian right of way does not exist. It reminds me a lot of New York, pedestrians are expected to be smart enough to stay out of the way of cars. I often feel like i'm playing frogger when i cross big roads. It is rarely possible to find a clean gap across 4 lanes of traffic so often you end up standing in the middle of the road in an empty lane waiting for the next one to clear. I wouldn't say its dangerous but it does keep you very aware of where all the cars are. Turn signals and stop signs are also totally optional. It took me a little while to realize but most people don't use turn signals at all, which makes deciding when to cross some streets much more tricky. I have seen one car pulled over by a cop before but i think that largely traffic regulation is non existent. Someone told me that there are 4 independent police forces in Monterrey. They said it was because whenever one gets corrupt they just make a new one but i'm not sure how much of that was a joke. Seatbelts are also pretty much non-existent. Taxi's rarely have them for passengers and i have yet to see any local wear one as a driver or passenger. Not having them doesn't bother me that much because when i ride in taxis we are usually driving pretty slow, there are speed bumps all over the place to regulate speed. I'm suprised taxis don't get in more accidents with all the weaving through traffic that they do, but even if they did nobody is going fast enough to do any real damage.
Thats it, thanks for reading :) Feel free to ask me if you have questions
Ben Hamming
The way my school here organizes the year, every class gives 4 exams which end up being worth most of the grade. Last week was the first week of exams. Overall they went ok, i wont really know till i get them back. My worst exam by far was in E&M. I think the whole thing was a tragedy of errors in a way. I was pretty tired going into it and pretty stressed about it but i was confident in the studying i had done. The reason it went badly was that on one question i for some reason started to do the problem the wrong way (it still works, but the math is WAY harder) instead of the simple way. I spent quite a while trying to make the math work without any success and i was getting more and more frustrated. The question after that one also used the answer i couldn't get. In the end i just explained exactly how i would get the answer. My explanations weren't that great though because the test ended a half hour earlier than i expected. The test had 4 questions, the first one i definitely got right, the 2nd i felt good about but my answer at the end seemed strange so i might have made a math mistake somewhere. The third i never finished and the 4th i explained. I'm hoping the teacher gives partial credit so i pass. Overall i think i just need to get more sleep and relax before the next exam. The simple answer was something i had done 30 times or so and as soon as the test ended and the stress left i realized what was wrong (given 20 min i could have done it all after that). Doing badly on that test made me more nervous for my thermodynamics test but it went incredibly well. I had better timing on that test than any other test in my life. The professor told us to put our pencils down as i was boxing my last answer :) So all in all i had two tests that went ok but not incredibly (chem and society) one bad one, and one great one. I'm glad its over and i think i'm going to do a lot better in the next exam week.
Today
Today i got up for tennis, then had a group meeting for a presentation, did some homework, ate some food, went to the supermarket and bought a pineapple, some cereal, and some ice cream (as a reward) and now i am at home and about to go to bed and sleep as long as i can. It has been a really nice relaxing day which is great.
Traffic
It also occurred to me that i should talk about the culture and general observations instead of just saying what i'm doing. This time i want to mention how traffic works. The biggest and most obvious difference is that pedestrian right of way does not exist. It reminds me a lot of New York, pedestrians are expected to be smart enough to stay out of the way of cars. I often feel like i'm playing frogger when i cross big roads. It is rarely possible to find a clean gap across 4 lanes of traffic so often you end up standing in the middle of the road in an empty lane waiting for the next one to clear. I wouldn't say its dangerous but it does keep you very aware of where all the cars are. Turn signals and stop signs are also totally optional. It took me a little while to realize but most people don't use turn signals at all, which makes deciding when to cross some streets much more tricky. I have seen one car pulled over by a cop before but i think that largely traffic regulation is non existent. Someone told me that there are 4 independent police forces in Monterrey. They said it was because whenever one gets corrupt they just make a new one but i'm not sure how much of that was a joke. Seatbelts are also pretty much non-existent. Taxi's rarely have them for passengers and i have yet to see any local wear one as a driver or passenger. Not having them doesn't bother me that much because when i ride in taxis we are usually driving pretty slow, there are speed bumps all over the place to regulate speed. I'm suprised taxis don't get in more accidents with all the weaving through traffic that they do, but even if they did nobody is going fast enough to do any real damage.
Thats it, thanks for reading :) Feel free to ask me if you have questions
Ben Hamming
Sunday, September 5, 2010
Wish Me Luck
My cold passed fairly quickly. I spent most of friday napping and relaxing and by saturday it had turned into a stuffy nose and most of my energy was back. Today the nose was not as bad and i had more energy. I'm going to bed early tonight and hoping i'm totally done with this when i wake up tomorrow. As for the reason i need luck, this coming week is exam week. Monday i have an exam in society/culture, Tuesday in E&M, Wed i have a 20 minute presentation in society/culture about violence against women, and Thursday i have an exam in Thermo. This is going to be the first big checkpoint to see how i'm doing in all the classes!
Today after church the Australian Missionary i met invited me to eat lunch with his family. I ended up staying at their house till 5:30 visiting with them. It was really nice to meet the family and see the house. I'm really glad i've gotten to know them. It cut into my studying time a little but it was totally worth it :)
Also, random story. My thermodynamics teacher is the most traditional/old fashioned teacher i have ever had. He is a big orator and is very excited about everything he teaches. He writes everything on the chalkboard, what he teaches does not follow the same pattern as the book, and he only permits questions in specified points in the lectures. His class is kind of quirky but i think the quirks make it interesting. Last thursday 15 minutes before the class was going to end one student grabbed his stuff and stood up to go. I didn't think that was a big deal at all, in a lot of classrooms students are encouraged to (if necessary) leave with as little fuss as possible. The teacher stopped him and spent the entire remaining 15 minutes of class explaining why such behavior is totally unacceptable. His main arguments were that:
1.If one person leaves today, tomorrow 3 will leave, and soon everyone will leave.
2.Common laws of courtesy are all that separate us (in this academic utopia) from those killing each other in the streets (his words, and they are an exaggeration don't worry :)
3.His classes are the only wealth he has left to him and if we do not respect them there will be nothing left to him in life.
Some of his arguments seem kind of silly but he was deadly serious. Incidentally he never explained the protocol for leaving the class early on the first day. We now know that if we let him know beforehand and sit near the door it is ok. I could not believe how much he exaggerated in all of his explanation or how big of a deal he made it. I am soooooo glad that i was not the one who tried to leave :) I still like this guy as a teacher i just have to be very very careful not to cross any of his lines.
Thats it, i will post how the exams went at the end of the week, thanks for reading!
Ben Hamming
Today after church the Australian Missionary i met invited me to eat lunch with his family. I ended up staying at their house till 5:30 visiting with them. It was really nice to meet the family and see the house. I'm really glad i've gotten to know them. It cut into my studying time a little but it was totally worth it :)
Also, random story. My thermodynamics teacher is the most traditional/old fashioned teacher i have ever had. He is a big orator and is very excited about everything he teaches. He writes everything on the chalkboard, what he teaches does not follow the same pattern as the book, and he only permits questions in specified points in the lectures. His class is kind of quirky but i think the quirks make it interesting. Last thursday 15 minutes before the class was going to end one student grabbed his stuff and stood up to go. I didn't think that was a big deal at all, in a lot of classrooms students are encouraged to (if necessary) leave with as little fuss as possible. The teacher stopped him and spent the entire remaining 15 minutes of class explaining why such behavior is totally unacceptable. His main arguments were that:
1.If one person leaves today, tomorrow 3 will leave, and soon everyone will leave.
2.Common laws of courtesy are all that separate us (in this academic utopia) from those killing each other in the streets (his words, and they are an exaggeration don't worry :)
3.His classes are the only wealth he has left to him and if we do not respect them there will be nothing left to him in life.
Some of his arguments seem kind of silly but he was deadly serious. Incidentally he never explained the protocol for leaving the class early on the first day. We now know that if we let him know beforehand and sit near the door it is ok. I could not believe how much he exaggerated in all of his explanation or how big of a deal he made it. I am soooooo glad that i was not the one who tried to leave :) I still like this guy as a teacher i just have to be very very careful not to cross any of his lines.
Thats it, i will post how the exams went at the end of the week, thanks for reading!
Ben Hamming
Thursday, September 2, 2010
This week and random things
Schedule
First off, i realized there are a few things i never mentioned on here that i really should. First there is my schedule. Mon Wed Fri are my slow days when i try to get things done, tuesday thursday are the busy days.
Mon-Wed
tennis 7am-10am
chemistry 1:30 pm-3pm
society and culture 6pm-7:30pm
Tue-Thurs
tennis 7am-9:30am
E&M 1pm-2:30pm
Thermo 3pm-4:30pm
Salsa 5:30pm-7pm
tuesday-Bible class 7pm-9pm
thursday-Frisbee 7pm-9pm
Fri
tennis 7am-10am
You can see that Tuesday and Thursday i have only one break, between tennis and E&M, the one between thermo and salsa i eat dinner during. Just thought this was something that belongs on my blog and i hadn't posted it yet.
Trip
A few weeks ago i went on a trip to the grutas de garcia (grutas=caves). It was a lot of fun and we got to see a lot of neat cave formations. I took a bunch of pictures but the lighting in the caves was really really bad so its hard to make out most of them. Just google image search grutas de garcia and you can see all the things i saw :)
This last week
A lot has happened since my last entry. Last sunday i went to see SALT with a friend from the US named Julian. We also met one of his friends along the way named Melanie and she decided to come with us. Turns out she lives about 50 ft away from me and we never knew it! She has a tiny little one person apartment but it is pretty nice inside. She is from Canada and has a boyfriend that lives here in Mexico, they met when the boyfriend was in Canada. Anyway the movie was good and then in the mall there i found myself a new pair of tennis shoes which i desperately needed. Then we went to wallmart and i got notebooks, cereal, tennis grips, a pineapple, and shirts. I needed more shirts because with tennis i didn't have enough clothes to make it through a week without laundry. Fortunately i found a rack of simple thin (thin=cool,temperature) shirts for about $2 each so i bought 4. This morning i just realized that even though the hangers they came off of all say large two of them are actually mediums and don't fit that well. When i got back i cut up my pineapple and this week i have been snacking on it. My host mom told me that there are also really little pineapples you can buy that taste a lot sweeter. I saw them at wallmart but didn't buy any so next time i am going to.
Monday was a pretty regular day except i had my first test in chemistry. I felt like it went pretty well which was nice because i hadn't studied for it all that much. Other than that i just went to class and did homework. Tuesday morning i didn't hear my alarm go off so i missed tennis practice. I really need to buy a new one because the one i have is really quiet and with all the fans going it is easy to sleep through. A few weeks ago i met an Australian missionary at my church. He is here with his family running a bible education program four youth and ministry leaders. He told me that he was going to start a class on Marc and asked me if i would be interested. We talked for a while and he is a really nice guy so i told him i would take the class. It meets tuesday evenings from 7-9. In the past i played frisbee on tuesday and thursday evenings so now i'm only getting half the frisbee but i think its worth it. Tuesday was the first day that i had the class and i liked it. It is taught in spanish, and often he struggles with words and especially pronunciation but everyone helps him out and all the other students are really nice. Sometimes i help translate questions for him and afterwords i gave him a few tips on pronunciation (he always emphasized the first parts of words ending with cion, he would say ádoracion instead of adoracion). I think im going to continue going to the class. The whole thing costs around $30 (materials ect.) and it is for basically the whole semester.
Wed was an eventful day. I had to skip tennis practice to go turn in all my visa paperwork and that process took the whole morning. Then when i got back from the visa office i realized i had lost my wallet! I remembered having it at the office but right after i got out of the taxi it wasn't there. I went right away and canceled my debit card and the international office here called people at the visa office and asked them to be looking for it. Then i went to chemistry where i got my test back and i got a 72%. It was a lot worse than i thought i did (but still passing). It turns out what happened was there was one set of questions that all build on one another. I got the first part wrong and then although i applied all the concepts correctly, each question after that was wrong. That represented almost all of the points i lost. There was one quesiton i didn't know the answer to, and another one i couldn't remember how to say the name for a geometric shape in spanish. I drew it and worked out all its angles and everything but apparently they wanted the name. The shape is if you take two elongated triangular pyramids and then stick them base to base, its kind of diamond shaped. I'm not even sure how to say it in english really. All in all i'm ok with how it turned out, i just have to pay really really close attention to problems that build on one another in the future because there does not appear to be partial credit. After chemistry when i was at home eating lunch the international office called and said that the taxi driver had found my wallet in his car and was going to return it. I think that when i pulled coins out to pay the taxi my wallet must have fallen out. Anyway that was a huge relief. I kind of wish now that i hadn't canceled my debit card because now until i can get a new one getting money is going to be a pain. Right after i finish writing this i am going to pick up my wallet :) Also the physics homework due today was mercifully short, which was really nice and gave me some time to relax.
This morning i woke up to go to tennis and discovered that i am sick. I have a sore throat and a bit of a headache. I don't think its serious i'm just going to skip Frisbee tonight and try to go to bed really early. I sent the coach an email and explained why i have missed three days this week (slept through alarm, visa, sick). The team is pretty loose with commitment though, people have their own schedules and the coach knows they just come when they can. I still have not been told officially that i can practice with them but for now i am assuming i can because it has been a few weeks.
Now i'm off to get my wallet and go to class. Thanks for reading everyone :)
Also, i have been here one month today! I arrived on Aug. 2. I can't believe a month is gone already, it really seems like time is speeding up.
First off, i realized there are a few things i never mentioned on here that i really should. First there is my schedule. Mon Wed Fri are my slow days when i try to get things done, tuesday thursday are the busy days.
Mon-Wed
tennis 7am-10am
chemistry 1:30 pm-3pm
society and culture 6pm-7:30pm
Tue-Thurs
tennis 7am-9:30am
E&M 1pm-2:30pm
Thermo 3pm-4:30pm
Salsa 5:30pm-7pm
tuesday-Bible class 7pm-9pm
thursday-Frisbee 7pm-9pm
Fri
tennis 7am-10am
You can see that Tuesday and Thursday i have only one break, between tennis and E&M, the one between thermo and salsa i eat dinner during. Just thought this was something that belongs on my blog and i hadn't posted it yet.
Trip
A few weeks ago i went on a trip to the grutas de garcia (grutas=caves). It was a lot of fun and we got to see a lot of neat cave formations. I took a bunch of pictures but the lighting in the caves was really really bad so its hard to make out most of them. Just google image search grutas de garcia and you can see all the things i saw :)
This last week
A lot has happened since my last entry. Last sunday i went to see SALT with a friend from the US named Julian. We also met one of his friends along the way named Melanie and she decided to come with us. Turns out she lives about 50 ft away from me and we never knew it! She has a tiny little one person apartment but it is pretty nice inside. She is from Canada and has a boyfriend that lives here in Mexico, they met when the boyfriend was in Canada. Anyway the movie was good and then in the mall there i found myself a new pair of tennis shoes which i desperately needed. Then we went to wallmart and i got notebooks, cereal, tennis grips, a pineapple, and shirts. I needed more shirts because with tennis i didn't have enough clothes to make it through a week without laundry. Fortunately i found a rack of simple thin (thin=cool,temperature) shirts for about $2 each so i bought 4. This morning i just realized that even though the hangers they came off of all say large two of them are actually mediums and don't fit that well. When i got back i cut up my pineapple and this week i have been snacking on it. My host mom told me that there are also really little pineapples you can buy that taste a lot sweeter. I saw them at wallmart but didn't buy any so next time i am going to.
Monday was a pretty regular day except i had my first test in chemistry. I felt like it went pretty well which was nice because i hadn't studied for it all that much. Other than that i just went to class and did homework. Tuesday morning i didn't hear my alarm go off so i missed tennis practice. I really need to buy a new one because the one i have is really quiet and with all the fans going it is easy to sleep through. A few weeks ago i met an Australian missionary at my church. He is here with his family running a bible education program four youth and ministry leaders. He told me that he was going to start a class on Marc and asked me if i would be interested. We talked for a while and he is a really nice guy so i told him i would take the class. It meets tuesday evenings from 7-9. In the past i played frisbee on tuesday and thursday evenings so now i'm only getting half the frisbee but i think its worth it. Tuesday was the first day that i had the class and i liked it. It is taught in spanish, and often he struggles with words and especially pronunciation but everyone helps him out and all the other students are really nice. Sometimes i help translate questions for him and afterwords i gave him a few tips on pronunciation (he always emphasized the first parts of words ending with cion, he would say ádoracion instead of adoracion). I think im going to continue going to the class. The whole thing costs around $30 (materials ect.) and it is for basically the whole semester.
Wed was an eventful day. I had to skip tennis practice to go turn in all my visa paperwork and that process took the whole morning. Then when i got back from the visa office i realized i had lost my wallet! I remembered having it at the office but right after i got out of the taxi it wasn't there. I went right away and canceled my debit card and the international office here called people at the visa office and asked them to be looking for it. Then i went to chemistry where i got my test back and i got a 72%. It was a lot worse than i thought i did (but still passing). It turns out what happened was there was one set of questions that all build on one another. I got the first part wrong and then although i applied all the concepts correctly, each question after that was wrong. That represented almost all of the points i lost. There was one quesiton i didn't know the answer to, and another one i couldn't remember how to say the name for a geometric shape in spanish. I drew it and worked out all its angles and everything but apparently they wanted the name. The shape is if you take two elongated triangular pyramids and then stick them base to base, its kind of diamond shaped. I'm not even sure how to say it in english really. All in all i'm ok with how it turned out, i just have to pay really really close attention to problems that build on one another in the future because there does not appear to be partial credit. After chemistry when i was at home eating lunch the international office called and said that the taxi driver had found my wallet in his car and was going to return it. I think that when i pulled coins out to pay the taxi my wallet must have fallen out. Anyway that was a huge relief. I kind of wish now that i hadn't canceled my debit card because now until i can get a new one getting money is going to be a pain. Right after i finish writing this i am going to pick up my wallet :) Also the physics homework due today was mercifully short, which was really nice and gave me some time to relax.
This morning i woke up to go to tennis and discovered that i am sick. I have a sore throat and a bit of a headache. I don't think its serious i'm just going to skip Frisbee tonight and try to go to bed really early. I sent the coach an email and explained why i have missed three days this week (slept through alarm, visa, sick). The team is pretty loose with commitment though, people have their own schedules and the coach knows they just come when they can. I still have not been told officially that i can practice with them but for now i am assuming i can because it has been a few weeks.
Now i'm off to get my wallet and go to class. Thanks for reading everyone :)
Also, i have been here one month today! I arrived on Aug. 2. I can't believe a month is gone already, it really seems like time is speeding up.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
A Week of Ups and Downs
The Bad
This week has been kind of chaotic. It started off reasonably well except that my alarm clock/phone did not wake me up for tennis tuesday morning so i missed a practice. The crazy part started on tuesday. In that E&M (electricity and magnetism) class there are two homework assignments a week one due tuesday and the other thursday. The first week he put both online at the same time so it was easy to do them in advance. This week he forgot though and did not post the second assignment until Tuesday evening. My problem is that i'm busy all tuesday evenings and i had class and some other homework to do on wed. I didn't end up starting the homework assignment until around 9:00 pm wed night and i worked on it until 3 am. At 3am i hadn't finished but i called it quits so i could get some sleep (before waking up for tennis at 6am) and then i spent another hour and a half before class finishing it up. Part of the reason the homework took me that long was that i ended up helping three students with one of the problems. I was really glad i got to do that because they were some of the students who saved me in the first week by helping me learn the math i was missing but it ended up taking a long time. I ended up explaining it to them at different times and places (instead of all at once) and it always took a long time to explain. It was kind of frustrating that it made me stay up so late but i'm really glad i got to return the favor and help them out. During class the teacher apologized for posting the homework late and said he would try to post it earlier in the future. There were a lot of tired people in that class, one of the guys who sits near me apparently didn't sleep at all that night. Anyway i'm just glad thats over for this week and i have resolved to get the majority of the homework done a long time before the night before.
At the beginning of the semester i signed up for a free tennis class. I figured that if i couldn't make it on the tennis team it would be good to have as a backup. Now though i am starting to think that i will be able to practice with the team and even if i can't i think the people i have met would be willing to play with me so i want to drop the class. I found out though that i can get charged to drop it. Apparently dropping a sports class costs somewhere around $50. Tomorrow i am going to the office where i drop the class and ask if that's true ect. but i have been assured by a multitude of people that it is. I'm still going to drop it, i don't have energy to take a tennis class after tennis practice but i feel a little robbed.
The only other pseudo bad thing is that my other classes are starting to get warmed up and are giving work now. The society and latin american culture class i am in just recently assigned a bunch of projects for the semester. In a group i am going to be making 3 presentations in the next two months each between 20 and 40 min. That same class also has three exams that are going to be scattered throughout and just started assigning papers (though i have hope that won't become consistent). We have also just started to learn about thermodynamics in thermodynamics. The course got a really slow start, and although i am sure it will not be nearly as hard as E&M it looks like it is going to start demanding some time investment pretty soon. I don't think i'm going to have to worry about any of those classes for another week, but i'm a little concerned that their additions to the workload will be more significant than expected.
The Good
First and foremost, for two days this week the heat let up and it was GLORIOUS!! On wed and thursday the highs were in the low 90's and the forecast is that we won't get back up to 100 until after the weekend. Today was the first day since coming to mexico that i did not sweat (not counting tennis practice) which i'm pretty happy about. My walk to school is a lot more enjoyable when it is not really hot. Now i am really really looking forward to the cool season :)
I thought that tennis today (the day after i got 3 hours of sleep) was going to be terrible, but it was amazing. Every once in a long while in tennis there are days when it seems like you can do no wrong. I had one of those today :) I was just playing normal for most of the day but then at the end for an hour of a doubles set i played amazing. It is easily the best doubles i have ever played. My team still lost (in a tiebreak) but i had a blast. It was a great way to start the day and it really offset the tiredness.
Anyway thats it. Looking back at this my bad section is a lot longer than my good section. I think that might be because i'm getting more and more tired as i write this and i'm about to get into bed. Just realize that quantity of comments does not indicate the total balance of quality. The weather cooling down outweighs pretty much everything else mentioned above :) Overall the week has been good i just need to make sure i never do homework to 3am again. Now that the homework is all going to be posted so soon i think i'm just going to try to get in the habit of doing it all on the friday before the week it is due in (i don't have class friday). I think if i just go and spend the day in the library i could get E&M totally out of the way for the week. I'm hoping i can start that policy tomorrow :)
Thanks for reading
This week has been kind of chaotic. It started off reasonably well except that my alarm clock/phone did not wake me up for tennis tuesday morning so i missed a practice. The crazy part started on tuesday. In that E&M (electricity and magnetism) class there are two homework assignments a week one due tuesday and the other thursday. The first week he put both online at the same time so it was easy to do them in advance. This week he forgot though and did not post the second assignment until Tuesday evening. My problem is that i'm busy all tuesday evenings and i had class and some other homework to do on wed. I didn't end up starting the homework assignment until around 9:00 pm wed night and i worked on it until 3 am. At 3am i hadn't finished but i called it quits so i could get some sleep (before waking up for tennis at 6am) and then i spent another hour and a half before class finishing it up. Part of the reason the homework took me that long was that i ended up helping three students with one of the problems. I was really glad i got to do that because they were some of the students who saved me in the first week by helping me learn the math i was missing but it ended up taking a long time. I ended up explaining it to them at different times and places (instead of all at once) and it always took a long time to explain. It was kind of frustrating that it made me stay up so late but i'm really glad i got to return the favor and help them out. During class the teacher apologized for posting the homework late and said he would try to post it earlier in the future. There were a lot of tired people in that class, one of the guys who sits near me apparently didn't sleep at all that night. Anyway i'm just glad thats over for this week and i have resolved to get the majority of the homework done a long time before the night before.
At the beginning of the semester i signed up for a free tennis class. I figured that if i couldn't make it on the tennis team it would be good to have as a backup. Now though i am starting to think that i will be able to practice with the team and even if i can't i think the people i have met would be willing to play with me so i want to drop the class. I found out though that i can get charged to drop it. Apparently dropping a sports class costs somewhere around $50. Tomorrow i am going to the office where i drop the class and ask if that's true ect. but i have been assured by a multitude of people that it is. I'm still going to drop it, i don't have energy to take a tennis class after tennis practice but i feel a little robbed.
The only other pseudo bad thing is that my other classes are starting to get warmed up and are giving work now. The society and latin american culture class i am in just recently assigned a bunch of projects for the semester. In a group i am going to be making 3 presentations in the next two months each between 20 and 40 min. That same class also has three exams that are going to be scattered throughout and just started assigning papers (though i have hope that won't become consistent). We have also just started to learn about thermodynamics in thermodynamics. The course got a really slow start, and although i am sure it will not be nearly as hard as E&M it looks like it is going to start demanding some time investment pretty soon. I don't think i'm going to have to worry about any of those classes for another week, but i'm a little concerned that their additions to the workload will be more significant than expected.
The Good
First and foremost, for two days this week the heat let up and it was GLORIOUS!! On wed and thursday the highs were in the low 90's and the forecast is that we won't get back up to 100 until after the weekend. Today was the first day since coming to mexico that i did not sweat (not counting tennis practice) which i'm pretty happy about. My walk to school is a lot more enjoyable when it is not really hot. Now i am really really looking forward to the cool season :)
I thought that tennis today (the day after i got 3 hours of sleep) was going to be terrible, but it was amazing. Every once in a long while in tennis there are days when it seems like you can do no wrong. I had one of those today :) I was just playing normal for most of the day but then at the end for an hour of a doubles set i played amazing. It is easily the best doubles i have ever played. My team still lost (in a tiebreak) but i had a blast. It was a great way to start the day and it really offset the tiredness.
Anyway thats it. Looking back at this my bad section is a lot longer than my good section. I think that might be because i'm getting more and more tired as i write this and i'm about to get into bed. Just realize that quantity of comments does not indicate the total balance of quality. The weather cooling down outweighs pretty much everything else mentioned above :) Overall the week has been good i just need to make sure i never do homework to 3am again. Now that the homework is all going to be posted so soon i think i'm just going to try to get in the habit of doing it all on the friday before the week it is due in (i don't have class friday). I think if i just go and spend the day in the library i could get E&M totally out of the way for the week. I'm hoping i can start that policy tomorrow :)
Thanks for reading
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Tennis and electro magnetic theory
Its been a while since my last entry and a lot has happened. Last i wrote i was about to go to my first class on electro magnetism, how that class has evolved is a bit of a story.
E&M
One of the biggest deciding factors in coming to this school was that i needed to take electricity and magnetism 1 to be able to stay on track in my major. I found a class that was exactly what i needed at this school. When i got here however i discovered that the class i had seen online was not being offered, but a very similar one was. I was registered for the similar class during registration and figured i would make it work somehow. The first day of the class was pretty basic we learned about dot and cross products (if that means anything to anyone) so afterwords i thought i would double check with the professor if that was the class i should be in. He told me about another class that i should look into. I went through a few secretaries and finally met the director of the physics department. He is a really really nice guy and was happy to talk to me. After some discussion he recommended a different class called electro magnetic theory, which it turns out, is exactly the class i found before i came. I was really glad that i had worked all that out and changed my schedule that day.
On thursday i had my first class of electromagnetic theory and it totally blew me away. The professor talks pretty fast but i could usually keep up with understanding the words, the problem was that i understood none of the material. Almost the entire first day went over my head which was pretty disconcerting. After the class i went and talked to the professor and he asked me a few questions and then told me i should drop the class because i didn't know enough math to survive. At the end of our very brief conversation he told me he couldn't force me to drop his class but he said i was really going to struggle to survive. After examining the textbook and emailing some professors from whitworth i found out what the problem was. There is a chapter at the beginning of our textbook that goes over vector calculus that is used in electro magnetic calculations. At whitworth during the class we learn how to do that math in the first unit. Here everyone takes a full class on using the math presented in the first section. The gap in knowledge was really only one chapter, but everyone but me had a rock solid grasp on it all (and i didn't have a clue). That weekend i spent all my time in the library reading that first chapter, and a textbook i found that explained the concepts. Fortunately some students from the class were also in the library on sunday doing the homework so they helped explain some of the things i couldn't understand. It also turns out that homework from this class takes an eternity to finish. From talking to other students i think the median time of completion for the first two assignments was around 5 hours. I'm about to do the third one when i finish this entry. I have been told that it is not as hard as the last two and one of my friends did it in 4 hours apparently. Right now i think i have a pretty good grasp on the math i learned. I'm still a little slower than everyone and i have to double check myself pretty often but i'm getting the hang of it. This class is definitely going to represent 3/4 of my work load this semester though. I'm definitely learning a lot though. I am still a little worried about it all and i think i will be until the first test (assuming it goes well) it was a strange experience to have a professor tell me he thinks i'm going to fail.
Also, a random funny fact about the class. The professor's policy on cell phones is that if one goes off, the culprit must bring a cake to class. After a cell phone rings the person is identified and then the class votes on the flavor of cake they want. Apparently on the last day of class each person responsible is expected to bring their assigned cake. Other students in the class have had him before and they say he is deadly serious about it. I kind of like the system, and i'm excited for the last day of this class for more than one reason now :)
Tennis
Also, last week i found the coach of the tennis team here and got in contact with him. He said that i could come out for practice and he would let me know if i could practice with them. All last week i went to practice from 7am-9:30 or 10am. It turns out that everyone on the tennis team is WAY better than i am. The first day of practice the coach had me warm up with some players but when it became apparent that they were that much better than me he had me switch. I played a match against another player, and for a minute i was excited because i won, but then i found out that he too was trying out for the team and was not in fact a member. Most of the practices this week i was just told to play with that guy but as i got my game back it became pretty apparent that i was better than him. The scores of all our sets during the week were 7-6,6-3,6-0,6-1,6-2,6-1. On friday he was not at practice so he might have been cut i'm not sure. I am going to go back on monday, and every day until he tells me i can't anymore. The group of guys is really nice, each day when i wake up all i want is to be cut from the team but by the time i'm warmed up its always a lot of fun. All the girls are incredibly good too. There is one girl who practices with the girls team (but isn't good enough to be on it) that i lost to 6-4, but i really think i could beat her if we played again. I got a blister halfway through our match and it made it a lot harder to play. I was supposed to find out on friday if i was going to be cut but i didn't get told anything. I played a set against one guy who is actually on the team and i don't think i have ever lost so fast or so badly. Afterwords though i was told to play tiebreaks with a different guy from the team and i won 1/3! I don't think he was trying when he played me, but he didn't mean to let me win one. At the end i hit two of the best aces in my life to get ahead and then won one more lucky point to win. It felt pretty good to win something even though i knew he wasn't giving it his all :)
Anyway, i have to go get my homework done now. If you have any questions feel free to ask, and i will try to update this at least once a week from now on :)
Thanks for reading!
Ben Hamming
E&M
One of the biggest deciding factors in coming to this school was that i needed to take electricity and magnetism 1 to be able to stay on track in my major. I found a class that was exactly what i needed at this school. When i got here however i discovered that the class i had seen online was not being offered, but a very similar one was. I was registered for the similar class during registration and figured i would make it work somehow. The first day of the class was pretty basic we learned about dot and cross products (if that means anything to anyone) so afterwords i thought i would double check with the professor if that was the class i should be in. He told me about another class that i should look into. I went through a few secretaries and finally met the director of the physics department. He is a really really nice guy and was happy to talk to me. After some discussion he recommended a different class called electro magnetic theory, which it turns out, is exactly the class i found before i came. I was really glad that i had worked all that out and changed my schedule that day.
On thursday i had my first class of electromagnetic theory and it totally blew me away. The professor talks pretty fast but i could usually keep up with understanding the words, the problem was that i understood none of the material. Almost the entire first day went over my head which was pretty disconcerting. After the class i went and talked to the professor and he asked me a few questions and then told me i should drop the class because i didn't know enough math to survive. At the end of our very brief conversation he told me he couldn't force me to drop his class but he said i was really going to struggle to survive. After examining the textbook and emailing some professors from whitworth i found out what the problem was. There is a chapter at the beginning of our textbook that goes over vector calculus that is used in electro magnetic calculations. At whitworth during the class we learn how to do that math in the first unit. Here everyone takes a full class on using the math presented in the first section. The gap in knowledge was really only one chapter, but everyone but me had a rock solid grasp on it all (and i didn't have a clue). That weekend i spent all my time in the library reading that first chapter, and a textbook i found that explained the concepts. Fortunately some students from the class were also in the library on sunday doing the homework so they helped explain some of the things i couldn't understand. It also turns out that homework from this class takes an eternity to finish. From talking to other students i think the median time of completion for the first two assignments was around 5 hours. I'm about to do the third one when i finish this entry. I have been told that it is not as hard as the last two and one of my friends did it in 4 hours apparently. Right now i think i have a pretty good grasp on the math i learned. I'm still a little slower than everyone and i have to double check myself pretty often but i'm getting the hang of it. This class is definitely going to represent 3/4 of my work load this semester though. I'm definitely learning a lot though. I am still a little worried about it all and i think i will be until the first test (assuming it goes well) it was a strange experience to have a professor tell me he thinks i'm going to fail.
Also, a random funny fact about the class. The professor's policy on cell phones is that if one goes off, the culprit must bring a cake to class. After a cell phone rings the person is identified and then the class votes on the flavor of cake they want. Apparently on the last day of class each person responsible is expected to bring their assigned cake. Other students in the class have had him before and they say he is deadly serious about it. I kind of like the system, and i'm excited for the last day of this class for more than one reason now :)
Tennis
Also, last week i found the coach of the tennis team here and got in contact with him. He said that i could come out for practice and he would let me know if i could practice with them. All last week i went to practice from 7am-9:30 or 10am. It turns out that everyone on the tennis team is WAY better than i am. The first day of practice the coach had me warm up with some players but when it became apparent that they were that much better than me he had me switch. I played a match against another player, and for a minute i was excited because i won, but then i found out that he too was trying out for the team and was not in fact a member. Most of the practices this week i was just told to play with that guy but as i got my game back it became pretty apparent that i was better than him. The scores of all our sets during the week were 7-6,6-3,6-0,6-1,6-2,6-1. On friday he was not at practice so he might have been cut i'm not sure. I am going to go back on monday, and every day until he tells me i can't anymore. The group of guys is really nice, each day when i wake up all i want is to be cut from the team but by the time i'm warmed up its always a lot of fun. All the girls are incredibly good too. There is one girl who practices with the girls team (but isn't good enough to be on it) that i lost to 6-4, but i really think i could beat her if we played again. I got a blister halfway through our match and it made it a lot harder to play. I was supposed to find out on friday if i was going to be cut but i didn't get told anything. I played a set against one guy who is actually on the team and i don't think i have ever lost so fast or so badly. Afterwords though i was told to play tiebreaks with a different guy from the team and i won 1/3! I don't think he was trying when he played me, but he didn't mean to let me win one. At the end i hit two of the best aces in my life to get ahead and then won one more lucky point to win. It felt pretty good to win something even though i knew he wasn't giving it his all :)
Anyway, i have to go get my homework done now. If you have any questions feel free to ask, and i will try to update this at least once a week from now on :)
Thanks for reading!
Ben Hamming
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