Various notes from first and second weeks
Jul. 12th, 2009 02:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sniffnoyADan seems to be just "Dan" generally now, as he's the only Dan here. Well, there's Daniel Lu, but I think he's usually "Daniel", and he doesn't seem to come out much, anyway. Quite possibly that's a good thing, as students would ask where the name came from, and maybe we shouldn't go telling them how he originally earned that nickname... Thought: since Dan is a counselor now, does that mean he inherits the title of "CDan"? (Answer: No, no more than the counselor named "Dan" my first year was ever known as "CDan". Though there were 2 other Dans that year, namely ODan and Dan Rubin.)
I mentioned the girl (Nazerke) who came in on Thursday of first week; she's not the only case of very unusual arrangements we have this year, though. One of Lucas's students, Minh-Tam, is actually not living in the dorm with us. See, he has some rare skin disease such that he has to go home every night. But he stays as long as he can, so even though he doesn't sleep here, he definitely is not some sort of outsider, he really is a PROMYS kid, working with the others, etc... What's really crazy - notice I did not mention where "home" for him is. In fact, he's from the midwest, and his parents rented an apartment in Boston and are temporarily living here just so he can do this! Wow.
Lucas suggested we do some doorknocking on a room where some students who were rarely seen in public spaces were known to be spending most of their day; I was quite surprised to find on the floor a suspended game of Illuminati: Crimelords. "Yeah, this is way too long a game for you guys to be playing on a weekday. I don't think any of us have played Crimelords, but we're well familiar with Illuminati..."
We still have not gotten the chance to play AGoT.
Question: How much overlap is there between people at these various math summer programs? Raku Watari, who was a first-year here last year, and who I'm friends with on Facebook, posted a status update involving various Mathcamp stuff that Youlian had told me about (namely, foodtongue and "Monkey, monkey, piffle, piffle"), and confirms that yes, he is at Mathcamp this year. And I remember my first year we had the case of Bob Cordwell, who had been at the Ross program the previous year and was quite annoyed to learn that no, that does not mean you get treated as a second-year. (And my second year, ODan and Teja turned up at the "High School Honors" program in the very same dorm, leading to us actually being kind of friendly with those kids that year... but that's not a math program.) But mostly I get the idea that PROMYS, at least, is pretty insular.
I'm overseeing a first-year lab once again, if I haven't mentioned this before. Half my lab group failed to show up on Thursday; Lucas or Ila, I forget which, made a big point of announcing after lecture Friday that if you've signed up for lab, you have to go! I'm pretty sure that in previous years people have quit this early, but both them leaving would leave my lab group with all of 2 people. Which maybe could work with second-years, but not first-years. Apparently they quit without telling anyone after the first day, because somehow they thought I had said that we were going to meet every single day. Not sure what I said that resulted in that. Hopefully they'll return with no further problems, because otherwise the group is gutted. (Not to mention they actually got quite a bit done on the first day, and then on the second day, whoops! Felix and Albert don't have any of their notes!)
-Harry
I mentioned the girl (Nazerke) who came in on Thursday of first week; she's not the only case of very unusual arrangements we have this year, though. One of Lucas's students, Minh-Tam, is actually not living in the dorm with us. See, he has some rare skin disease such that he has to go home every night. But he stays as long as he can, so even though he doesn't sleep here, he definitely is not some sort of outsider, he really is a PROMYS kid, working with the others, etc... What's really crazy - notice I did not mention where "home" for him is. In fact, he's from the midwest, and his parents rented an apartment in Boston and are temporarily living here just so he can do this! Wow.
Lucas suggested we do some doorknocking on a room where some students who were rarely seen in public spaces were known to be spending most of their day; I was quite surprised to find on the floor a suspended game of Illuminati: Crimelords. "Yeah, this is way too long a game for you guys to be playing on a weekday. I don't think any of us have played Crimelords, but we're well familiar with Illuminati..."
We still have not gotten the chance to play AGoT.
Question: How much overlap is there between people at these various math summer programs? Raku Watari, who was a first-year here last year, and who I'm friends with on Facebook, posted a status update involving various Mathcamp stuff that Youlian had told me about (namely, foodtongue and "Monkey, monkey, piffle, piffle"), and confirms that yes, he is at Mathcamp this year. And I remember my first year we had the case of Bob Cordwell, who had been at the Ross program the previous year and was quite annoyed to learn that no, that does not mean you get treated as a second-year. (And my second year, ODan and Teja turned up at the "High School Honors" program in the very same dorm, leading to us actually being kind of friendly with those kids that year... but that's not a math program.) But mostly I get the idea that PROMYS, at least, is pretty insular.
I'm overseeing a first-year lab once again, if I haven't mentioned this before. Half my lab group failed to show up on Thursday; Lucas or Ila, I forget which, made a big point of announcing after lecture Friday that if you've signed up for lab, you have to go! I'm pretty sure that in previous years people have quit this early, but both them leaving would leave my lab group with all of 2 people. Which maybe could work with second-years, but not first-years. Apparently they quit without telling anyone after the first day, because somehow they thought I had said that we were going to meet every single day. Not sure what I said that resulted in that. Hopefully they'll return with no further problems, because otherwise the group is gutted. (Not to mention they actually got quite a bit done on the first day, and then on the second day, whoops! Felix and Albert don't have any of their notes!)
-Harry
