An LMF 2020 Appreciation Post

AKA a few of my favorite memories

Having just graduated in MIT's first online commencement, I did not feel that much closure to these last four years. I don't think the commencement organizers could have done much differently - there's only so much you can do to replace the feeling of everyone being together in the same physical space. However, the mini zoom celebrations afterward (for me: Course 3, Terrascope, and DPhiE) were filled with nostalgia, goodbyes, and the promise of reunions. LMF already did an amazing job at putting together a last-minute senior sendoff during the insanity of our last days on campus (which I should probably detail in a later blog post, since I guess that was a unique moment in history), but I will add my own post-graduation celebratory post in honor of our class year in LMF.

Here are some of my favorite memories, in no particular order:

Azzo

Thank you for taking me out to a bar on my 21st birthday! Even though it took a while, since the first bar wouldn't accept your Oxford ID rip, it was a lot of fun. I don't know how it happened, but we coincidentally share orchestra and writing hobbies, which is pretty convenient, except when you send me viola > violin memes. A runner-up memory, which unfortunately I didn't have a great picture of, was that time we played background music for Dolce & Gabbana, and we got paid but one of the managers was pretty rude and snobby, and honestly the entire experience was kind of surreal. Here's to sharing more surreal memories in the future!

Azzo and I out and about on my 21st birthday!

 David

This picture is that day we went hiking in the summer with Liz and Jesse after seeing Tanglewood during a downpour. For some reason, even though the trails were pretty flooded and we were mostly skipping on slippery rocks, it was still a fun trip. I didn't want to deal with uploading a video onto this website, but perhaps my favorite part of the hike was when we had to work together to cross a rushing river by dislodging a tree trunk and using it as a bridge to cross to the other side. I think we were crazy, but it worked. Second favorite memory would probably have to be that time we went to EC and you showed off your dance skills to Taylor Swift. Thanks for being a great friend and president!

David in a yellow raincoat in the woods.

Effie

My favorite memories are basically all the LMF trips that you organized. Throwback to our most recent trip in Quebec, which was my first time in Canada. I don't think any of our 2020 trips would have been possible without your amazing organizational skills and Airbnb sightings, not to mention you are the most trusted driver in our group and put together great playlists. Second favorite memory would have to be freshman year when Kedi, Larry, and I went to cheer you on in Terra-hockey and we were pretty much the only people in the audience ("try to do BETTER!"). Good luck in California!

Our senior fall trip in Quebec <3

Jakob

I could have picked the memory from freshman year when we painted the Tardis door together in old New House, and you had basically painted everything, but because I have better handwriting and apparently come across as more *artsy*, everybody thought it was me. But I decided to opt for an even earlier memory. This was the first time I went to the BSO, and I remember being super excited but also disappointed because a really tall guy sat in front of me and I couldn't see anything. You switched seats with me, which I was thankful for, and even though I joke that you need to work on your personality, sometimes your personality is okay.

Jakob, Mary, and me coming from the BSO.

 Kedi

This is an early memory from the Terrascope spring break trip. Again, I didn't want to deal with uploading videos, but I will forever remember how to eat a taco correctly. Thanks for being a wonderful roommate for the past two years, and I can't wait to visit you in New York and watch Broadway! Another favorite memory (or memories) would have to be interning at Form with you and getting free lunch everyday, or riding in Jarrod's car on the way back from FormFest. Congrats again on Fulbright and your NSF fellowship!

Freshman Kedi and Vivian in Mexico City.

 Kristin

Tragically, I don't have a picture of both of us at Dear Evan Hansen, but the fact that you won the lottery and invited me to come with you like the day after my birthday was one of my favorite birthday gifts ever! Thank you for being sweet and having taste (in musicals and spiciness), and I wish we could have been on the same cook team together. Second favorite memory - beating Zade and Effie at partner hearts haha.

Watching Dear Evan Hansen with Kristin!

 Liz

This is a photo from the summer when somehow you managed to get free tickets to see a national gymnastics competition in TD Garden. I don't even know how that worked out, but watching the gymnasts perform with you was something I'll never forget. It was crazy to have four acts going on at once, and my eyes couldn't decide what to focus on because everyone was so talented and athletic. Also hearing you fangirl about Simone Biles was great lol. Runner-up memory is probably when we went to see Toy Story 4 for your birthday. Thanks for being such a great friend in LMF and DPhiE, and hope that we get to be roommates next year!

Liz and I about to witness pure talent and athleticism.

Félicitations to all the LMF seniors who graduated!!!

Summer Quarantine Adventures: the WASP* saga

If we’ve ever zoomed during the day, perhaps you’ve noticed that I’m rocking back and forth on a swing chair on my front porch. I might have even shown you my view, which consists of mellow palm trees with leaves that dance gently in a warm summer breeze. I bet most people see where I am and think, She’s living in a southern paradise. It really could be a paradise -- if only my porch swing was not hiding a wasps’ nest.

If you’re really lucky, you would have seen a wasp trying to enter the pipe of my porch swing. Let me emphasize trying. The wasp, carrying a small leaf, like a peculiar, green gift, readies to return home after a hard day’s work. Unfortunately, the wingspan of the wasp is greater than the diameter of the pipe, so the wasp must, in a leap of faith, close its wings and stop flying for a moment to catch inside the pipe and climb upwards. 

The wasp fails to do this multiple times: it flies full-speed into the pipe, bounces back from the impact, flies full-speed into the pipe, etc ad nauseum. It’s like watching a person ram into a glass door, over and over.

Some people have questioned why I sit on my porch swing despite knowing that there are wasps inside. I am not particularly brave, but seeing these wasps fail again and again at trying to enter the pipe opening, I can’t help but pity them and think they are pathetic. I could ignore them, until the day that I finished my final exam at MIT and ended my student career.

I had submitted my last assignment that morning for 14.03 Microeconomic Theory and Public Policy, and I thought that I would reward myself by swinging on my front porch, enjoying the nice weather, and listening to Bill Bryson’s The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. Just as I had settled on the swing porch, however, a black bullet zoomed past me, and I froze.

You see, the day before I had asked my father to destroy the wasp nest after deciding that I could risk terrible, stinging pain each time I sat outside, or I could just not. He, with an infinite courage and nonchalant attitude, drove his screwdriver into the pipe, turned it around, and withdrew, letting scraps of dried, brown paper that made up the homes of the wasps flutter down. He was fortunate that no wasps were home. Then, he sprayed the pipe with bug disinfectant, and for good measure, stuffed the pipe with newspaper so that the wasps could never hope to rebuild.

And so I knew that the wasp that I had just dodged was no ordinary drone wasp, but the wasp QUEEN. While the ordinary wasp was one inch in length, the queen was thrice its size. She had spiny legs and a yellow-striped skirt. Unlike the regular wasp, she flew with purpose, and she was fast, like an arrow that couldn’t miss its target.

I saw the wasp QUEEN, and I heard her. There is a reason that hornets are associated with fury, and wasps are the close cousins (at least in my mind) to hornets. She was practically buzzing curses, and her anger radiated in supersonic waves around her. 

I don’t care what people think about the intelligence of insects, she knew that I was the reason her home was destroyed and her eggs and subjects were poisoned with chemicals. She also knew that the door she buzzed in front of was the door to my home, and I was certain that she was plotting her revenge. She wanted to wreak havoc unto me like I did unto her, which meant that she was planning to attack me and my family and destroy our house.

Don’t ask me how a single wasp could destroy a house - just watch this video. 

After what seemed like an eternal stare down - me vs. the QUEEN - I held my breath, sprinted forwards, opened and closed the handle in a whirlwind, and exhaled. Not hearing any buzzing, I hurried towards the front window to see the wasp QUEEN ram her body into the door, over and over. It was terrifying, but my family and I were safe. For now.

That was how I spent the last day of class: at home, with my parents, mostly inside. When the spring semester started, I hadn’t imagined that was how I would spend my last day as an MIT student. I remember, after returning from China in January, that my father had suggested I stay home rather than go to school, to save myself from future Covid-19 complications. I laughed. Miss school? My senior spring? Back then, the idea seemed absurd. I thought we had escaped the virus when we left China, specifically when we passed security and everyone in the US airport peeled off their face masks. Rather ironic now, really.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not thankful for my health, my family’s health, and all the essential workers risking their lives everyday. I don’t know when quarantine will end, or what the world will look like after, but until then, I will zoom with friends and swing on my front porch, now that most of the wasps are gone.

Of course, there is still the wasp QUEEN. 

And the wasp saga continues...

*After some online research, what I thought was a wasp appears to be a leafcutter bee. However, I maintain my misclassification to be true to the living moment.

Wales, no whales

French House, sorry for being the cruft on the blog, it’s a habit… (although seriously y’all should blog too… (saying that’s also a habit…))

I’ve been in the UK over a week now. My mom flew in with me, and we spent a few days in the Cotswolds, which is a lovely bit of England full of villages with names like “Stow-on-the-Wold” and “Bourton-on-the-Water” and “Mourton-in-Marsh”, sheep, and clotted cream. We had some hearty long walks through fields with cheese picnics, a few gin-and-tonic permutations, and an exciting day trip to Oxford - the museums are beautiful buildings with seriously impressive collections.

Now I’ve been in Wales for four days. I haven’t seen much of the countryside yet, unfortunately, and the small parts of Cardiff that I’ve seen haven’t been that extraordinary except for the giant castle in park. My mom did spend a day walking around Cardiff before she left and said that it’s a completely crazy city, but apparently in such an unexplainable way that I still have no idea what she meant. I’m staying in a suburb with my school’s math department head, who’s been very welcoming in a hands-off sort of way.

Mostly I’ve been occupied with the school I’m at, and that’s been quite a fascinating experience. It's an urban school with a diverse, largely Muslim, relatively poor student body. My first impression wasn’t great; the building is covered in peeling paint and smells like bleach, and I was seeing it at 6:55 AM, which probably didn’t add any charity to my viewpoint. I’ve learned since that the per-student budget is very low, less than $6,000. And yet all the adults I’ve spoken to - principal, program organizer, the Welsh Education Director that I sat next to at a dinner - after throwing around the words “challenging population”, have talked about the renown that the school has achieved for a remarkable transformation in the last few years. 

This made me suspicious. I’ve been thinking a lot about score inflation since my educational statistics class last semester, and the story of achieving fame for a rapid transformation with an underprivileged population sounds very similar to a lot of the American cheating scandals. In an interesting difference from American educational testing, where schools care most about standardized tests and students care most about SATs and grades, the targets here are more or less aligned: maximize students’ grades, which are determined by a government-mandated combination of standardized exams and projects. So there are very strong incentives for gaming the system, and I haven’t been surprised to see some evidence of sketchy behavior. The computer science teacher keeps doing a shifty-eyed dance of “Well, I’m not technically supposed to help them with their projects, but I figure as long as I don’t touch their keyboard it’s all right”. The music teacher hires her hairdresser to pretend to be an examiner to give the kids some pressure to perform. The school very intensively targets support to students just below a cut-off that the government uses to determine effectiveness, exactly as happens in many American schools. Many lessons are centered on working through practice exams, teaching concepts as they come up. Students take time out of classes to sit mandatory full-length mock exams. And the teachers often assign their students' grades for the government-mandated final projects; with so much at stake, for both the school and the students’ university admissions, I imagine it’s hard to stay objective.

The school also claims to be heavily data-focused, and that seems to be quite true. Students are sorted by math ability into seven or eight different levels. Kids take formal reading assessments frequently; those with difficulties are placed in special support programs, and the number of library books they check out is tracked and discussed at staff meetings. There are charts everywhere showing students’ photos along with their exam performance or other metrics, even in student-accessible spaces - I feel pretty bad for the kids who are in the “High effort, low progress” box in the hallway. I’ve met several staff members whose main job is data analysis. Bizarrely, you pay for the canteen by scanning your thumbprint. It all feels a little invasive, but I have to say that is seems effect in not letting kids drop through the cracks and get forgotten, as I’ve seen happen at my Cambridge school. Every teacher and administrator knows which students are particularly struggling or succeeding.

And I’ve actually been really impressed with most of the teaching and learning I’ve observed. The kids are majorly loud and burst out chatting as soon as a teacher turns around, though a “three… two… one…” usually buys a few seconds of peace. Yet much of the time, what they’re talking about is the material they’re covering. They’re curious and invested in learning, and the math material in particular seems fairly advanced - for example, I observed a class the other day where fourteen-year-olds were studying sampling techniques, which I didn’t encounter until AP Stats. I was particularly amused by a science class in which the thirteen-year-olds were trying to figure out how to set up the scales in their graphs. They were having a hilarious amount of difficulty in choosing the gradations, but they were really thinking about it rather than giving up. My favorite class that I’ve sat in on has been a group of thirteen-year-olds that were learning about symmetry. The teacher convinced them that she’d been a traveling magician on a motorbike with a caravan who charged fifty pounds for her famous paper-folding show; they were like 70% sold… “Miss, did you have a stage name?”. The most depressing class has been a group of fourteen-year-olds with severe disabilities or behavioral problems. It was so clear that the teacher - who was wonderful with the top-level group I’d seen earlier, and who ran the “crowd control” quite well even here - didn’t have the resources or specialized training to teach effectively to that group, that the kids had completely different challenges and levels of understanding, and that many of them were getting nothing whatsoever out of the class.

Lunchtime in the math staff room (closet/“cupboard”, actually) is a riot. In the first three days, I learned my colleagues’ preferred methods for murdering a classroom of children, breakup-by-Whatsapp drama, childbirth vaginal tearing experiences, and quite detailed sexual preferences. The Minister of Education remarked that the Welsh are congenitally nosy, and that seems rather born out. I’m expanding my vocabulary, too - why don’t we have “lush” and “brill” in the U.S.?

Generally I’m quite enjoying it here, and I feel like I’m getting opportunities to see all corners of a school in a pretty unique sort of way; it’s really making me want to take that education policy class at Harvard next semester. The lessons I’ve taught so far seem to have gone over decently, I have a bunch of exciting ones coming up, and I think I’m of sufficient interest to the kids (“Miss, do you know Donald Trump?”) that I might have a real impact. The education ministry is sending in people with cameras to make a mini-documentary about me and the other GTL instructors, which I am not happy about, but que sera...

Milan: City of Trickery

This past weekend, G. (’19), J. (’20), and I travelled to Milan, which is possibly the city with the most unexpected surprises so far. Here is a guide so that if you choose to visit Milan (it was fun!), you will be equipped with knowledge:

I actually like anchovy pizza.

1. The Entrance Test

After you arrive at the airport, there will be a friendly local who will offer to help you buy metro tickets. Ignore them. It’s extremely easy to buy tickets with the machines. These people will take your change or demand money for their service. Luckily, I recognized what the woman was doing and firmly told her we didn’t need her help, so we weren’t duped.

2. The Infinite Metro Loop

We were on the metro. The next stop would have been the stop we were going to get off at. BUT to my shock and great confusion, the metro started reversing direction. What? What is happening??? We arrived at the stop at the airport, and suddenly the metro started running in its original direction. This is the “Oscillating Metro Trap” where if you aren’t paying attention, you wouldn’t notice that you’re travelling back and forth between these three stops forever. To escape, get off at a stop, then walk to the other side of the metro station.

3. The Unattainable Treasure

On top of a terrace (Duomo).

Although The Last Supper is in a museum, you actually need to make a reservation a month in advance for tickets. Or, you could relent and buy a pricey tour, since lots of tour guides buy out all the tickets for this famous painting. Unfortunately, we did not know this, so we did not see it.

4. The Sea of Peddlers

In almost all the tourist places, there are many people who will try to sell you something. In short, if someone tries to talk to you, shut them down. I was impressed by G. (’19)’s ability to utterly and repeatedly reject such friendly-seeming people, although he was approached at least eight times. Meanwhile, unsure if these vendors are sexist, but J. (’20) and I were not asked once.

Milan is quite beautiful, and the city has great gelato. (The pizza is yummy, but not extraordinary). In all, I think my favorite part during the trip was when we were walking back from the Duomo under a golden cloudy sky at sunset, with rain droplets gently splashing down, and with a grape and chocolate gelato cone in hand, a rainbow behind me and the music of a talented street guitarist fading, I realized just how lucky I was to have MISTI.