Knowledge is Happiness

I would really like to learn to speak more languages. I think it would be really interesting to learn something outside of the Germanic/Romance languages, and even more so something outside of the Indo-European language family, but yet I think it would probably be easiest to branch out slowly. I've been saying for the past few years that I'm going to learn Spanish, but yet I never seem to actually get around to doing so.

I would also like to learn to play more instruments. I already do piano, clarinet, and alto sax, but I would like to know more. I think I'd like to add a string instrument to my repertoire - guitar seems like the obvious choice, I guess. I've been thinking about buying a ukelele to start out on, so I might do that. Someday I would really like to learn the cello - I think they're such a beautiful instrument - but it's really not within my financial means right now, so that will have to wait a while.

I guess really one of the main skills I would like to learn is people skills, but I think those ones just take practice. Things like striking up conversations with strangers, or making new friends more easily, bringing up difficult topics of conversation - those are all things that I've just never been good at.

Knowledge-wise, I would like to learn more science. I really liked physics (and math) a lot in high school, but just not as much as arts, so I didn't really get a chance to continue on with them in university. My best friend/former roommate is a physics student, and one of my other former roommates was in engineering, so just being around them and talking about what they were studying helped a little bit, but I would really like to know more. I thought it would be interesting to learn some biology, too, since the only time I ever studied it was learning the parts of the cell way back in grade nine--but I tried watching Crash Course and after a certain point they were just so full of acronyms and unfamiliar words that I always came out feeling more confused than when I started, so I've resigned myself to just not ever knowing biology.

Anyway, as much as I would really like to know everything, those are the most major ones, so I think I'll close out there.

Bullying Stinks

There was generally not a lot of bullying in my elementary school. It was a really small school, so there was a pretty low student to teacher ratio. Also most of  the teachers were really good about maintaining a safe and positive atmosphere, and most students' parents were pretty involved in the school community, which helped. That's not to say people never got picked on, but it was the sort of casual thing that shifted around and was directed at whoever said something dumb/wore something ugly/cheated at a game or something like that and was forgotten by the next day.

The one exception to this was this one girl in our class whose personal hygiene was not so great. Her, uh, distinct odour got her stuck with the nickname "fish" for years, poor dear. I was never involved with the bullying, it was mostly the boys that did it, but I also never stood up for her or went to a teacher about it or anything either, which I feel bad about now that I'm older.

Most of my experience with bullying was in junior high. There was one guy in my class who bullied me a lot for three years straight. A few of his friends were in on it too sometimes, including two who were on my bus and used to make fun of me there, but he was definitely the worst one and the ringleader of it all. There were a lot of day-to-day incidents like name-calling and him going through my stuff and things like that, but the worst was in French class. Our teacher always made us do presentations in pairs that could be about anything, but we had to use a certain number of verbs conjugated in whatever tense we were working on, and sometimes he and his partner would put mean jokes about me in their presentations in front of the whole class. The worst part was that the teacher never did anything about it, and so I didn't see any point in going to a teacher or anyone about it, since he obviously knew it was a problem and just didn't seem to care.

Junior high was also the only time I can ever remember really being a bully, too. One of my friends had been acting bitchy for a while, so my best friend and I decided we needed to do something mean to her... junior high logic really does not make sense to me now. Anyway, we took one of those survey-questionnaire things that people fill out about themselves... you know, the kind of things people used to do facebook notes with all the time? Except at this point they went around through email. So we made a fake email account in her name, took one of those surveys and filled it out as if it was from her, but made all the answers really mean and embarrassing things, and then sent it out to everyone we knew. The next day she called everyone it had gone out to, telling them it wasn't really her, and asking them not to read it if they hadn't already. I remember how guilty I felt as soon as she called me and I heard how upset she was - and I think that was the moment I decided to try my best to be a nice person.

In high school the bullying stopped almost completely. The nice thing about going to a big school is that all the social cliques are big enough to live in their own little worlds, so I could more or less surround myself with people I liked and never had to deal with the people I didn't. The fact that most of my classes were IB probably helped to since most of my bullies weren't the type to be in IB classes. I really only had one experience with bullying in all of high school. A guy I knew broke up with his girlfriend because he wanted to be with me - although the major flaw in this plan was that I had absolutely no interest in dating him. I'm really not sure how he overlooked that very important detail. I almost feel like he used me as an excuse to get out of the relationship or something. Anyway, his girlfriend didn't seem to care that I wasn't interested (and I can't really blame her for that, even if she was wrong - I mean, I'd be pretty pissed too, if I were her). It also just happened that she went on my bus. So for a few weeks after that she and her friends would sit as close to me as possible and trash talk me the whole way home. I didn't really care that much since I hadn't even done anything and nothing they were saying was true, but I was upset about it for the first little while because I was concerned that it would start rumours and get spread around to more people. That didn't end up happening though, so basically it was the least effective bullying ever. All in all, high school was a pretty good time, and there was not a whole lot of bullying. Although there was some major public bullying directed toward the only openly gay student at the school, and it got pretty awful sometimes. Basically it all culminated when another guy threw a chair at him on Halloween because he was dressed up as a flapper. I wasn't there for this, but he got caught by a teacher and from then on all the teachers kept a close eye on things and as far as I know most of the bullying died down after that

And that is pretty much all of the bullying events I have ever had any experience in. That sort of thing seemed to get left behind pretty much completely at university, I guess people finally grew up.

Where I feel justified in taking a teaching major without becoming a teacher

There were two questions that stuck out to me, one that I'm semi-qualified to answer and the other which I essentially spent four years learning about. So! Un-qualified answer first:

"What was it like to live on your own for the first time? What's most difficult and how do you deal with it?"


I guess I'm really just now living on my own, since rent is no longer optional (hey, it was a commune, things were different!). I'm a big fan of security, so probably the hardest thing for me is dealing with the unexpected things that crop up like, oh hey, my roommate has a horrible virus that is insanely contagious. I'm not allowed to work for a week!

My advice is two-fold; one, figure out ways to cut costs if you need to. I like having three levels of lifestyle: broke (rice, beans, and frozen veggies make up most of my food intake), saving (a couple small splurges here and there) and celebrating (usually for a special occasion), so that if something bad happens I know how to cut everything down to minimum to make up for it. Second, it's good to have an emergency fund as a buffer, and that's just something that needs to be saved up for (see "saving" phase of lifestyle).

For the other question, the answer to which I'll try to keep short and not gush over because this is the first chance I've really had to use my degree since I graduated, is simply "do you have any advice for good studying habits?"


Katie had some great ideas, so I thought I'd recommend a few things that a) I had beaten into my head as a pre-credential teacher and thus want to feel good about telling someone else :P and b) aren't talked about as often.


The first step I highly recommend is taking a learning styles test (I like the one here, though I wish I could find the one I did for one of my classes which showed a neat little graph of 8 separate learning styles). I've heard anywhere from 4-8 proposed styles, but it basically boils down to what sense you use to absorb information - sight, sound (both heard and spoken by you), or touch ("doing").

I am very, very visual, so I'll tell you what I ended up doing. I wrote notes in class, reread them within a week or so to get a refresher, and throughout the semester put all of them into Evernote (like Katie mentioned, in a simplified format so it wasn't overwhelming to go through them) so that I could have access to them on my phone or on college computers. I usually ended up making two columns, one with terms and the other with definitions, so that one my bus ride to school I could whip out my phone, cover half the screen, and do some quick studying.

Once I started getting more projects and papers assigned than tests, I tried to map out mini due dates for myself (i.e. outline, first draft, second draft, editing, polished draft), but I very often resorted to my failsafe of what my friends and I referred to as "fighting fires". It's very simple: look at what's due in the next week. Work on the very first thing until it's done. Repeat.

If you have lots of big projects that have heavy time investments that won't work well, but as someone who had many many small projects it was functional enough.

I hope this has helped a bit. If you've got any context specific questions (i.e. learning facts or larger ideas; specific learning style, etc) I'd be happy to answer them in the comments, I just don't want this blog to be massive. :)

Agony Aunt-ing

I'm going to try to give answers to two of these questions. I didn't really have good answers to many of the others, and these two sort of go together a bit, so hopefully there's something here that might be helpful.


How do you stop procrastinating?


I really only have one piece of advice for this one, and it will only help if you have the same type of procrastination problem as I do, but this is actually the only thing I've found that really works for me. Sometimes I procrastinate by reading or watching TV or deciding that I desperately need to reorganize my closet, but most of the time my problem is the internet. I use site-blocking software to prevent me from accessing the sites that I waste the most time on. The program I use is a piece of free software called Cold Turkey. It's Windows-only, but I know there are similar programs out there for Mac. You just type in the sites you want to block, and set how long you want them to stay blocked. Once you hit go, you can't get on those sites until the time is up. I find that the benefits from this are two-fold: obviously, it prevents me from actually wasting time on those sites, but knowing that I can't get on them also shuts off that nagging voice that says things like "I wonder if anyone's tweeted anything interesting" or "I wonder if any of my subscriptions have uploaded new videos," so that I can focus better on whatever I'm actually supposed to be doing.

Do you have any tips for good studying habits?


Create a designated study area. Do all of your studying there, and when you're doing things other than studying, go somewhere else. This helps make sure that you stay focused while you're studying.

Where applicable, review past tests/exams/assignments to identify your problem areas so that you know where you need to focus the most attention.

Condense your class notes into study notes. Only go through your full set of notes once, in order to create a shortened version of the absolute most important points. After that, read through the shorter notes as many times as you can. Try to use the important points to remind you of the smaller details, and only refer back to your longer notes if you need to refresh your memory on something. For one thing, going through 15 pages instead of 50 feels like a lot less work, and you can cover the same amount of material more times. Plus, if you can teach yourself to remember things in those sorts of chunks, you only need to memorize the bigger things to bring the details to mind, rather than trying to memorize every little thing in your notes separately. If you're super-keen and have enough time, try to make condensed notes as you go along, once you've finished a topic, rather than waiting until you have something to study for, because it will save time later and make studying seem less daunting so that it's easier to get started. It also lets you make sure you understand a topic while it's still fresh in your mind, and help get your brain into that connection-making mindset.

Take breaks every few hours. If you study too much at once your brain will just get tired and start jumbling things up. Try to use your breaks to do something that will help refresh you, like going for a walk, having a snack, or taking a nap. This will help you hit the ground running when you do start studying again, and it will also feel more like a break if you get up and move around and change gears completely, rather than just sitting down and logging into Facebook.

I sort of feel like I just regurgitated one of those 'study tips' emails that my university sends out every exam period, but these really are all things that I actually do, and they have helped.

Mice Facing Dragons

There are a lot of things that we know we should or need to do. And sometimes we do what we know we should and sometimes we run away like mice from the local feline. Or maybe we get distracted by a beautiful piece of cheddar, and that cheese happens to be a part of a humane mouse trap, except that the mouse trap is not as humane as it appears. And while we're distracted by that one piece of cheese, either the trap or the cat is closing in, whichever happens first.

I have a bad habit of running away from things. My brain knows it, my subconscious tries very hard to plant not so subtle messages into my dreams in order to get me to stop running away and procrastinating. I remember vividly this one specific and obvious dream about having a dragon egg. Someone told me I should get rid of the egg, but I didn't really listen because I hadn't had many bad experiences with eggs before. Except that the egg hatched and it was a dragon. The dragon kept getting bigger and more violent. So I ran around a lot, down roads, through towns, I hid in the church I went to as a kid and some other buildings, but that didn't work and there was just a lot of destruction.

Then I woke up.

My brain really wanted to drill a certain message into my conscious thoughts.

I still haven't learned that lesson. For instance, I know I should study calculus because of how necessary it is for, not only my grades now, but for what I want to do with my life. I should also do my homework to help get into my top colleges, but I am afraid to do my work because I'm afraid to acknowledge the hole I'm digging for myself by not. And thus the hole gets deeper.

I should confront my anxieties (you all must be sick of me bringing this up in posts all the time). I have to be medicated to enter my English class and I have breakdowns at the mention of a medical procedure. I'm just far too scared to actually confront the reasons for them. It's difficult. It's so much easier to just not get check-ups, not admit to any symptoms, to just hide away and not deal with it, whether the underlying reason is a fear of exposure, judgment or a trust issue, I don't know. But I know that like the dragon from my dream, those anxieties and fears are just going to get worse later on when I really do need see a doctor and I could end up getting something I might not have had I been able to confront these issues before. Yet I just keep putting it off.

Those are the two major things on my mind right now. Sometimes I feel like a mouse facing a dragon. I try to take steps in the right directions, yet I know most of the time I'm not putting my all into it. In the end, I need to get up and do what I know I should.

Aw man. this feels angsty. Disregard any angsty tones that may or may not be perceivable as I am too lazy to edit this. Thanks. :D

I was a prefect :D

I was pretty much going to the same thing as Katie did, I picked out some photos to show but I had to clean out my wardrobe and I found my old school ties and my prefect badge. I know that in USA you don't really have schools that have uniforms, I'm not too sure about Canada but I think it's the kind of the same, so I thought this would be some thing interesting to share.

These are the three ties I have, the one on the left is from the first primary scho

ol I went to, I was there from primary one to primary 3, the middle tie is from the second primary I went to because I moved house and it was closer, I was there from primary 4 to primary 7. The last tie is my senior high school tie which is still the same knot from the last time I wore it and it still has my prefect badge on it too. I'm kind of upset I that I don't have my junior tie any more, its like the other two ties it has stripes it was the same colour as the senior tie but with light blue stripes.

Here's a close up of prefect badge

I would like to point out that all the sixth years at my school got prefect badges, I'm not special in any way but I am proud to have gotten one. Another thing I think I should point out is that in my school juniors are first to fourth years and seniors are fifth and sixth years.

Anyway I hope you found my walk down memory lane at least a little bit interesting.