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Today was the last day of finals for me, and my final final was history. While preparing for it, I realized that there was something I had been thinking about for a good time now but just haven’t got around to writing about.
How History is Taught
I’m confident the way that history is taught is the reason why so many students don’t enjoy it. We are expected to remember that the vague, narrative events we are reading about were actual deaths, actual soldiers, actual people. We see things as a series of chained events to understand, not an actual event that happened. When we read about the thousands of hands mutilated in the Congo we don’t even flinch, let alone feel the pain for one of our fingers to be removed. It’s not like the shock of assasinations, public statements, or word of mouth has changed for the last two thousands of years; but when we read about them in a sentence we feel nothing. This problem will only persist with history recorded for the 21th century if we let this continue.
The headlines of Roe v. Wade or Kanye West’s statements on InfoWars are sensational and beyond real: how would we feel if they just got summarized in a textbook as “The highly influential ruling by the Supreme Court led to radical protests across the country and for some marked the US complacency in progress.” Kinda bland, right?
Perhaps it’s too hard for us to even imagine these events as real without tangible proof. After all the worlds we learn about in history, like India’s partition or Chinese dynasties, are not only so physically far away for some of us but also extremely distant in the past. Textbooks only make this worse by condensing this into a very singular narrative of event X leading to War Y which resulted in the Treaty of Z. While many teachers in this generation have done away with memorizing dates for good, the underlying problem of emphasis on events and not experience is a problem.
Even if the problem of history feeling like a straight story to be told is inevitable, it still can be done better. What makes stories interesting to most people is not just the ability to explore a new world (which history by definition can give!) but also its power to make us feel something. History classes should try to make us feel the same thing as the people we are learning about did. The collective psyche of a nation during massive events is more moving than a description and at a level of deeper understanding.
Examples of this “psyche”:
After Columbine, people were frightened to send their children to school and provided them with directions home.
After Jonestown, people mocked those killed as crazy and hell-driven.
After 9/11, the America re-evaluated Bush as a serious president and some races tried their best to be hidden.
You may have heard the saying “drink the Kool-aid”, but have you listened to the chilling Death Tape hours in Guyana before tragedy?
(My) Solution To Teach History Better
Pretty simple. Use primary source accounts. In fact, just have students read autobiographies like Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass detailing the experience of a slave or Night by a Holocaust survivor’s time in camp. Factual accounts are often seen as the peripheral or supplementary but that needs to change - textbook events / lectures should only be there to help give a basic way of thinking about the events at the time required to understand primary sources.
In my opinion, this marks a shift away from history being about learning what happened in the past to experiencing it.
One of the motivations for learning history we are commonly told is from the famous Santayana quote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” When we remember books or movies, we don’t remember what happened as much as what we felt when we went through them. History is likely no different: our years of education are numbered (well, for most of us), and if we want our experience in classroom history to be most fruitful for us to be able to cause future change it’s imperative that we remember them as best as possible. Heartstrings pull us into action, not words, and thus since reading first-hand sources is the best way to empathize with struggles in the past, it just may help prevent them from happening again. Otherwise, we are betting that we will remember numbers of tragedy decades later and furthermore, act on them.
Conclusion
Students should be thrilled to learn history. After all, it is the closest thing we have to time travel!
This year, I participated in No Shave November (we don’t talk about how the other \(N^{3}\) went for me.) Almost a week in December, I decided to shave it off. While I have no regrets about shaving it off, I do want to remember what it felt like (without having to wait almost a month.) Hence, this account.
As usual, all advice given here is to be taken with not a grain of salt but a molecule.
Preliminary Growth
I actually only realized I was not shaving in November a few days after when a decent stubble had already appeared. Photo below.
Beard as of 11/06
It looked okay, but was pretty itchy and overall pretty annoying. It didn’t form any kind of cohesive shape that was identifiable as a beard: put simply, it just looked like excess hair added on a clean-shaven face. It did get better, but the main thing during this step is to just not shave it nor obsess about it. Admit that it is NOT a beard, but will be soon.
For the most part and did feel discouraged by the slow growth. Luckily, I kept it on because only 4 days later, it was much more full.
Beard as of 11/10
Tip: Be patient. Why? Not all hair grows at the same rate. Somebody write a differential equation to model beard growth.
While this kind of a beard with stray hairs and even a little bald spot in the middle of the chin doesn’t look great to say the least, it does feel great. With my clean shaven face right now, I still find myself rubbing my chin hoping to feel the prickly sensation akin to mild acupuncture.
Here’s a list of all the things you can do with a beard:
Make Fun of Your Friends Who Can’t Grow One
Convince yourself you look better with it
Enjoy the feeling of constant poking on your face (good for winter)
Feel older
When Beards Suck
Basically, at a certain point in a beard enjoyer’s growth, the beard grows out of control. Hairs start to grow in incongruent directions and some extend farther out from your face than others. In other words, a mess. Furthermore, for me at least, my beard was not closing in all the way.
Beard as of 11/18
The only good thing at this phase was the mustache. Lowkey wished I just kept the mustache and shaved everything off, but more on that later. Of course, the beard still have the same benefits, but its hideous appearance made it more of “oh, that is a beard” than “damn, that is a beard.”
The only benefit to this was being able to claim that I participated in my skit group project playing Obi-Wan Kenobi by growing a beard.
However, that’s where trimmers come in. They remove excess hair on the sides and make the beard feel like something that was styled instead of accidental. During NSN, I only really did one trim. And it looked pretty fire afterward:
After trim, 11/21
Trimming is a lot of work compared to a clean shave, but it is worth it. By far, this was the peak of my beard growth. One of the things before I started growing my (former) beard was just the pure time commitment. It requires basically nothing except dedication and genes for it to grow to a point where it feels good, but for it to look good - much more than clean shaving. I only did one trim because trims take way too long.
Still, grow a beard. At least try to. Decide once the beard is there whether or not you want to trim.
The only thing with trimming though is to be careful. You could accidentally shave off your entire beard if you use a trimmer not right for your size.
The Post Trim Era
Post trim, I let the beard do its thing and continuing growing. It once again regressed back to its hideous, unclean shape. I guess you could say a prt of me enjoyed having that unclean hair on my face because of its ability to show to people that I was tired.
A little longer after trim, cerca 11/25
The photo above does a pretty good job at demonstrating the effect of the beard. If I was to smile today with my baby face, I would lack the inherent masculine and borderline aggressive vibes that my face used to give off. The effect of this all depends on those who view you, I guess.
Why I Shaved
It’s actually pretty simple. It was already a few days into December, and not only did my mom continously tell me every 5 seconds the beard looked bad, I also had a business pitch coming up in a few weeks.
It mostly changed though when I got this message from a fellow classmate:
The turning point, 12/2
Within a few days, I had decided to shave. The pressure was insurmountable and most of all, with November in the rearview mirror there was no real reason to keep it.
While the benefits of the beard are real, the main one is to relive the experience of being clean-shaven the first time.
I guess I knew about this the entire time. The main motivation ever-present in the back of my mind was to have the most satisfying clean shave possible.
Some shaving advice: don’t be like me
On December 4th, my mom was yelling at me shortly before going to bed about how she would get extremely mad and take my computer if I slept past 1:30am. So, to hopefully make her happy + suprise her, I decided to shave.
However, I was stupid and decided to procrastinate this to after all my work was done which was around 1:40am. Despite watching countless shaving beard videos, my brain decided that I would be able to shave without first using a trimmer and then the razor. When I realized this, I also realized another crucial detail: the trimmer was in another room and I didn’t want to wake her up either.
By the time this astounding insight fell upon me, I had already shaved in some areas of my face. Even worse, the hair was so thick that it essentially clogged up the razor and at times made it unusable. I had to manually remove the hair and continue going at it. It took almost three latherings of shaving cream for it to finally come off. The ensuing result was not pretty.
The sink @ 2am, 11/5
However, after the shaving was all done, it was arguably one of the best moments of my life. I couldn’t stop smiling and noticing how much cleaner I looked.
Conclusion: Try it
I am still extremely grateful that I did actually try and commit to No Shave November. It felt amazing to venture into unknown territory, that too through only natural growth. My only suggestion is to
at least try to a beard one for three weeks before making the lame excuse you can’t. Then shave it off and suprise everybody with how good you look.
This thanksgiving I watched the movie Where The Crawdads Sing with my family. As I was watching the suspenseful murder mystery, I had a suspicion that I made very well known to the 3 people around me that the book was very similar and related to To Kill a Mockingbird. I searched up if anybody else had drew the parallels and sure enough they had.
Regardless, here are all the parallels I could draw.
Setting
This is by far the most obvious. Where The Crawdads Sing and To Kill a Mockingbird were both set in the small, Southern towns during the 1960s. Both of them focus on the general idea of an outcast (more on this later) among a judgemental post-slavery society, albeit To Kill a Mockingbird’s much more defined focus on racism.
Similar Elements
Schooling
Both To Kill a Mockingbird and Where The Crawdads Sing depict on the impoverished conditions of American education. To Kill a Mockingbird shows Dill, a poor child attending school who cannot afford school lunch, and Where The Crawdads Sing depicts Kya being teased as a poor rat when walking into the public school barefoot. Both of them show the low education standards and high poverty present even among whites in the South at the time.
Racism
To Kill a Mockingbird is the most directly focused on racism and is even thought to be modeled after the Scottsboro’s trial case. Where the Crawdads Sing is less explicit but racism is clearly visible when the private inspectors call the African-American store owner, Jumpin, “boy” (derogatory term for African Americans during slavery era.)
Outsiders
Prejudice against “outsiders” from a judgemental town are at the essence of both stories. In To Kill a Mockingbird, the outsider is Boo Radley who is believed to be a ghost by the gossip of the town and Scout herself. In Where the Crawdads Sing, the same outlandish judgement is given to Kya, better known to the town as the mysterious “Marsh Girl.” While a trial for Radley is never conducted, it is discussed towards the end as something that would hurt him in the same way as would a trial of Chase’s rape of Kya.
Trial Case
This is by far the most obvious. Both To Kill a Mockingbird and Where the Crawdads Sing are stories of the trial which unreveal uglier realities. The only difference in this case is that Kya, the one on trial, was actually guilty and not charged compared to Tom Robinson.
Nature
For crying out loud, Where the Crawdads Sing and To Kill a Mockingbird both have birds in their names! Beyond that Where the Crawdads Sing is very focused on the deep interest of Kya in the nature and the world around her. To Kill a Mockingbird also has similar attention to nature with the bird imagery of “Finch” (an actual bird) all being birds, and the overall concept of birds not doing anything harmful in this world.
Which one is better?
I’m not in a position to judge but To Kill a Mockingbird definitely seems better. Perhaps because I spent half a semester reading it and not a night watching it.
This is an idea that’s been swirling for probably over an year now. Certain words seem to be extremely linked to other words. In other words, a word will almost always be preceeded by a word or a group of words before it. Now, this is not the obvious cases like using “of” in the blank after “States” in “United States __”; this is more the cases of using almost always using “water” after “bread” but not using vice versa.
Think of it as a fill-in-the blank challenge. Given some word or sets of word, what word will follow. Here are a few examples below.
“Give me some bread and ____.”
“I just need to put on my suit and ____.”
“That sweet and ____ taste is amazing.”
“Who are you guys, Adam and ____?”
Those were pretty simple right? It wasn’t like you’ve memorized these pairs.
But you have learned them. In fact, this actually has a special name of being a collocation. Collocations are words that are commonly said in one way and not reversed. You wouldn’t say “cons and pros” or “butter and bread”, now would you?
However, collocations are only one type of such word association where one or two words can effectively predict the next word. Another example would be the blank in “____ your bets” being “hedge”. Those aren’t necessary groups of words, as “protect”, “safeguard”, and “derisk” all would work, but basically work the same as collocation pairs.
The main point of showing these examples is to demonstrate that we actually don’t think about what we are going to say in terms of singular words but instead in terms of concepts/ideas/blocks. Beyond proper nouns, a simple proof of this is that we (well, most of us) can’t understand why we need the word “the”, instead of something like “a”, in the phrase “In the interest of time”, but naturally say the phrase.
Predicting one word in a sentence from what has already is a miracle and a super interesting task that we do on a daily basis. Here are a few more to enjoy :)
“Oh for ____’s sake, do the dishes!”
“If ____ permits, we can show a demo at the end.”
“That moment absolutely crushed my ____ in humanity.”
I’ve used LaTex for writing some stuff (check my notes lmao). In fact, if you’ve read some of the other articles here, you’ve seen latex before. It’s what allows me to render equations like:
\[L^{a}t^{e}x = p\_{r}^{e} \int ect\]
Latex is perfect. Why does it look so good and feel so good to write?
Code-like writing.
With latex, you still feel like you are coding while you are writing. It’s set with it’s own set of commands like \int for a nice \(\int\) or \begin{section} to start a new section of an article. Hell, you are even writing inside of a project with all the other files. You are literally compiling the files. Need I say more? This makes you feel cool and productive compared to writing words on an MLA formatted Google Document for an in-class APLAC essay 💀
Consistency in Rendering
LaTex always looks the same. You can count on its section headers to look the same, and you know that when you request a bibliography for you it will be automatically alphabetized. You can write an equation, move it to another section, and it will look the same.
Style
Style is a weird thing to describe. Aesthethic is an even worse word to use, because that makes it just more abstract. But I guess the best way to describe LaTex in three words is professional, clean, and precise. The LaTex Rendering never fails to produce the cleanest font. It makes me feel like I’m a real scientist who knows what they’re doing.
How to Use Latex
Just create another project on Overleaf and that’s it. Our you can select an arXiv preprint and start from there.
