My Second First Day

     For the second time, yesterday was my first day at CSCL. All in all, I am feeling like the decision to leave again was probably a good one. Yesterday I learned possibly more than I would in school, and I had much more fun also. The day started out with me waiting for the public bus around 8:45. The bus was scheduled to come about then. When it did come, (8-ish minutes late) the bus driver proceeded to not notices me and drive right by. This was odd, especially because I was waving. I then ran as fast as I could to the next stop, and due to traffic I managed to arrive there before the bus did. Still panting, I boarded the bus.

     When I arrived at CSCL, I said hello and found that one of my friends from the public school was doing a test day there. We chatted as other people arrived, and then the staff members called for the morning meeting.We assembled, and announcements were made about the morning schedule. After the meeting, I talked with my friends for half of the morning, then attended the midmorning Intro to Biology class. During biology, we talked about evolution and natural selection while destroying misconceptions. After biology, I had lunch, then proceeded downstairs to work with a staff member on a programming project.The project is a memory game made with Scratch, a visual language, that I am doing for the Harvard online course that I am taking.This took most of the afternoon, and after working on this it was time to leave. my bother was going to be getting a ride there and then taking the bus home with me, so I waited for him to arrive. When he did, we took the bus home, finishing of my second first day at CSCL.

Max

Going Back

     After a whole lot of indecision, I have not completely happily decided to go back to CSCL. This decision was not made as easily as the one I made last year, due to that my experience in the public school's 7th grade was by far superior to my time in the 6th grade. I am still not totally content with this decision, and am suffering from "Fomo" (fear of missing out). Unlike last year, I am choosing between two good options, which is much harder than choosing between a good and a bad. I am thinking about going back to the public school in September, due to the all of my friends at CSCL will be leaving (if you didn't notice, my going back and forth between the two schools shows that I like both).

     This year, I had teachers I liked, classmates I was friends with, no classmates I strongly disliked, academic peers, and some classes I enjoyed. I had none of those last year at the public school. The public school also has about 100 students in the 7th and 8th grades, whereas CSCL has 20 students total, with only 5-ish being anywhere near my age. This offers an important social aspect that I don't have at CSCL. For these reasons, the decision was not easy.

     CSCL does offer help when you need it but not when you don't, which is something that the public school had less of. I also have friends at CSCL that I won't easily be able to connect with in the future, whereas most of the people at the public school will be attending the public high school with me. There are things that I can learn at CSCL that I could not learn at the public school, but there are not nearly as many thing that I could learn at the public school that I couldn't learn at CSCL. Finally, CSCL lets me learn what I want, not something I'm not interested in. I will be starting at CSCL right after my winter break, and will likely start blogging on a more regular basis again.

Thanks for spending time reading this,
Max

Reasons I May Yet Again Quit (or Stay At) School

     Every week, I spend 30 hours in school. I'm not totally happy with my school, and I'm not sure that this 30 hours + transportation + homework is really the best way to be learning. Although I like all of my teachers and have a reasonable amount of friends, if the purpose of school is for me to learn than I don't really think I'm doing it in the best way. There are also good qualities of school that I would miss if I went back to where I was last year. Here are my current thoughts on school:

     The school I am at definitely has good aspects. My school has a greater diversity of kids in the 100-ish than in the 20-ish at CSCL. The importance of this is arguable. Also, I have a good amount of friends at my school whom I would miss if I left. From an academic point of view, at my school we have a daily Spanish class, where I have a great teacher and am usually challenged. At CSCL they have once-weekly Spanish classes. I also am part of a math team, where I get to see other math-smart kids and compete against the other schools in the city.

     The most important problem is that most of the time, the things I learn in school are either not new to me or if they are new, then they are practiced way too much. This is especially true in both of my math classes. The way I am learning just isn't efficient. For example, we had learned earlier in the year about volume and surface area of cylinders. I could have learned the two formulas in 10 minutes instead of the at least one week that we spent on them. I understand that the time spent on this was useful for many of the other kids in my class, but I could have been learning other topics.

Feel free to give me advice,
Max

Comparing and Contrasting the Three Locations that CSCL has Occupied

     In this post, I will compare all of the buildings that CSCL had been in during the time that I have been at it.  Currently, the one we are in now is my favorite, but if you agree or disagree with me you can tell me in the comments. I will be referring to the first one we were in as #1, the second as #2, and the final one as #3. So, here they are:

New Building!

     Two days ago, CSCL moved to a third new building! Of the three I have been in this year, I like this one the most. It is directly across from a very large park, in what used to be a nepalese convenience store. It is also fairly near the library, as well as a burger and pizza place.

     The building has two floors, and has more space than of any of the past ones. We have an air hockey table in the basement, and the old fridges are being used for storage. There is an outdoor area behind the building that they are currently working to fence in. Most of our stuff has been moved to this place.

     To get to it, every morning I ride the bus from a stop very close to my house to a stop just across the street from it. I love the new space.

Thanks for reading, and any ideas can go in the comments!

Circuitry and Soldering

     

     One activity that I enjoy doing at CSCL is building and soldering circuitry  From kits, I have made two little devices. One of them functions as a remote to turn off a television, the other one plays the game Simon. (Simon is a memory game where the player copies an continually growing sequence of randomly picked colors.) For both, I had to add little pieces to a circuit board, then attach them in. To solder them, I   use a hot soldering iron to melt solder onto the connection between the board to the little piece I'm attaching. Solder is an alloy with a low melting point, so the soldering iron doesn't melt the circuitry itself. On one of the devices I made, I had to solder over 40 connections!

New Schedule

     This week, CSCL made a new schedule  for the next month or so. They have added classes and subtracted classes. This blog post will detail the new classes I'm taking, as well as reexplain the ones that remain on my schedule. I am not doing debate anymore, because it was interfering with programming class. Also, the new space doesn't have an oven, so cooking class is not running anymore. Here's the new schedule:

• The physics class is will mainly be an introductory class, but the class hasn't happened yet, so I don't know the topics we will cover. 
• Algebra has been continued on from last time, and I am still attending it. This class provides challenging math  topics, which I did not have in public school. Also, this class is made up of my friends at CSCL.
• The Programming class is the same as it was before, and I can confidently say that it is my favorite class. We are still programming in the Processing language. The teacher of this class has transitioned it to a class where he gives us a project, and we work on it by ourselves.
• Free Range Chicken time is the same as before. It is the block of time where I don't have anything scheduled, so I can work on whatever I want.
• Due to that I am currently very slow at typing the correct way, I have decided to take the new typing class. I hope to get to a point where I can type fast enough to keep up with my thoughts.
• Because there were a good percentage of kids that wanted to do a Spanish class, CSCL has hired a teacher. I am excited to learn a new language, hope the class will be fun.
• Thursday afternoon, I have I one-on-one tutorial on either math or programming. I will decide weekly which topic I am in the mood for, and We then do a 45-minute to an hour lesson on it.

New Temporary CSCL Space

     For at least one week, CSCL we be relocated. We are moving due to multiple logistical issues. The other problem is that the second floor of the building we were in may not have been fire safe. Unfortunately  the new space is far enough away from my house that I can't walk to it every day, unlike the previous place. I will have to take the subway with a group of people from CSCL, instead of walking. This new space has two main rooms, plus a  room that we can sometimes use and another small room. There are organizations that work in other rooms of this building, so we have to be a little bit quieter than we were before. Some of the equipment owned by CSCL was moved, but a lot of it remains at the old building. I am exited for this new space! Thanks for Reading!

Overview of CSCL

     Today, I will describe the garage-house combo that I am learning in. The building has two floors, and just three rooms that we use. All though it looks very messy in these pictures, this was right before we cleaned up, and made the space much neater. A fourth room is rented out by a company called SocialSci, and is used as a workspace during the day.
The top floor (shown at right) is one gigantic room, with a table in the middle and big windows. The "Hall of Screens" (the only place kids are allowed to use a computer) is on the second floor. All of the meetings we have are on the second floor.









Downstairs, we have two rooms; one large one, and the library. The library is often used as a quiet place for reading and writing. This is mainly because it has a door that shuts out noise. Kids store their backpacks here.

This is the other room on the first floor. It also has a table, and a couch. The walls of this room are used for storage. This room is like a center room, because it is connected to all of the other rooms. Thanks for reading!

Computer Hardware

     Yesterday, I learned  about computer hardware and how each piece help make the computer function. We are going to build a computer from pieces bought off the internet, which made this topic  relevant to activities at CSCL. The parts that we are going to buy (also the parts I learned about) are the computer's case, motherboard, hard drive, memory, optical drive, GPU, and monitor. If I get som

1.  The computer's case house all of the inside components, to protect them and make the whole thing look pretty. The case usually has a built-in fan, which helps keep the electronics from overheating.

2. The motherboard is a circuit board inside the case which connects the other components together. The motherboard houses the CPU, Central Processing unit, which does the calculations for the computer.

3. The hard drive stores all of the data on the computer, using physical disks coated with a magnetic material. The hard drive is why files are not deleted when a computer is off or the files are not being used.

4. Memory stores information that is currently being accessed. This means that it keeps track of the tabs open in your browser, or what email you are looking at in your email. It copies the info from the hard drive, and deletes the information when you stop accessing it.

5. The optical drive is the part of the computer that DVDs and CDs can be loaded into. The computer scans the disks for the information stored on them with a laser.

6. The GPU, or Graphics Processing Unit, is a special chip that translates the data in the computer to images on the monitor.

7. The monitor is the screen of the computer, the part where the computer's user sees all the images that the GPU sends to to it.

By the way, I have been told how to  comment non-anonymously, and you can find out how in  that entry. Thanks for reading!

Debate Class Overview

     Due to that debating is not an subject normally taught in schools, I am devoting this entry to an overview of the two debate classes I have attended. In both classes, the students being taught have done the same activity. In neither class we debated things, but both were obviously debate related. We played a game called "Spot the Fallacy". This game was played in the following method: the players split into teams, and each team got their own white board. The instructor running the class would read a quote from a real person. Each team would have to use the find the illogical argument structure hidden in the quote. Posters with descriptions of ten or so fallacy types are posted on a near by wall. Each group would write the name of a fallacy type, for example the "fallacy of a circular argument", on their white board. When everyone flips their whiteboard, the team are accorded one point if the fallacy they wrote was in the quote. Even though I have not done any actual debating a point, I have been told that we will do that at some point. Sorry I couldn't post earlier!

My Schedule (as of now)

     Today, I decided to write a post about my weekly schedule. My learning program, CSCL, goes from Monday to Thursday each week, so Friday is not included on the spreadsheet below. I may be doing different projects at home each Friday, but I don't have any solid plans. Here is my schedule:

•      "Free Range Chicken" is a term that my dad came up with. It means that I do not have an activity scheduled, but I might jump in to a class for that day if the are doing something interesting and not really relevant to previous activities in  that class. Or I might work on a Scratch project.
•      My programming class is in a visual programming programming language called Processing. By visual, I mean that the programmer tells the computer to make lines and circles and other visual designs. 
•      In the one debate class I have attended so far, we ere read quotes that had reasoning that didn't make sense, which was called a fallacy. There were a list of classes of fallacies, and we had to say which fallacy the argument contained, and how we knew that. There will be classes where we argue a point, though.
•      In the cooking class, we pick a recipe, then cook it. 
•      The math class on Monday is a one-on-one class that I scheduled. Other people have other one-on-one math classes at different times.
•      The policy meetings on Wednesdays are meeting that everyone must attend, and are about whatever policy they deem important enough to devote a meeting to. the meeting can also be about a change in a policy.
• During the Book & Movie Club, we pick a book that has a movie that corresponds to  it, then over a course of a couple weeks read the book. When we have finished reading the book, we watch the movie version of it.
• The Algebra class on Wednesday is a introduction class to algebra. In the class I attended, we graphed points  to show the relationship of x and y. We also found the value of x in a basic algebra problem.
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My First day CSCL

     Yesterday, I had my first day at CSCL. I walked there in the morning, and arrived on time at 9 o'clock. There was a whole group meeting in the morning, with the 4 staff members and the 12 kids. I was told how the program worked and what basic rules they follow. The "learning facility" that they run does not have mandatory classes, so you can do whatever you want if you like. Later in my first day, I started a Scratch project. My project had a spaceship that shot alien spaceships that descended from above. It turned out to be harder to make than I thought it would be, so I stopped. I also made a structure out of a building toy called K'nex. I signed up for 5 classes: programming (x2), debate, cooking, and math. I can do any other subject research whenever I want to, or work on content that isn't covered there at home. My day was fun, but I will have more productive days continuing onward. Thank you for reading my blog!