Monter 2: Throw away old notebooks, assignment and exams — killed 291.302938%

Notebooks, assignment, exams, exercise sheets, reference sheets, crib sheets, I've been accumulating them for at least 10 years. Those handouts of verb tense, math formula, essay keywords — they were like my best friends + heroes for an entire school year/semester. Those homework, projects, reports — they were the product of long-night cramming often full of dedication and passion. I don’t see why I had to throw them away after their are no longer required for school. I may come back to reminisce with them one day.

And I did. This summer, I went pull them out from a corner of my basement for the first time since they were put in a corner of my basement. I guess, when I put them in that corner, I wasn't expecting that the day I pull them out would be the day that I absolutely HAVE TO pull them out — FOREVER. It was very emotional to flip through the stack of memories: from my first written production in French done in elementary school to my last statistic assignment with R (hopefully the last one in my life). There must be a way to stay to keep them, I wondered. But even if I keep them, they’ll be just sitting in a corner of my basement.

How can I prevent them from their fate of fading into oblivion?

Photograph them and share them online! Of course! So here I share with you a selection of some of my memorable stuffs from school.

1. Being 16 Poem

Teenagehood, anyone who went through have their own story to tell. Here’s my response to my English teach who asked us to write a poem about being 16, inspired by Disney’s OST (yeah, I was still watching Disney). Now that I read it again, it seems to apply to being 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, …

2. Best-and-Worst High School Teacher

High school, of course, can’t be complete if there was not one remarkable teacher. In my case, our school was lacking staffs in my last year and hired a very particular university professor to teach us physics, chemistry and biology. It was a love-hate relationship between her and us. I end up recording a bunch of quotes, saving them as comics in my note books and handouts. Some of them became our class’ inside jokes and got distributed in the quote section of our year book (after a supervised filtering).

3. Argumentative Essay for Graduation

This is a quote from our French teacher, referring to how time consuming the procedure that the people in the ministry of education must follow to grade our final argumentative essay and to detect cheating. Our teacher gave us a lecture about those rules and their loopholes. I remember following his advice, encoding pre-written essay parts on the one-sided crib sheet that we were allowed to use.

4. The Reform and Late Textbook Update

I was one of the lucky people who the ministry used to experiment education reform. In one year, our math textbook wasn't fully ready yet and we had to use a provisional version. Every few weeks, we were given one of there booklets which we were allowed to keep and write answers and draw other stuffs.

5. Stats — Bloody Stats!

Memories from university years are more bittersweet. Last spring, I kept questioning myself whether my joint major with statistics will be an advantage or a complete waste of time. For example, I could have more time to do programming instead of writing this hideous crib sheet. Seems like in most programming jobs, high school math is the standard.

6. Printout Teacher Notes

One year, I used my printing credits to print my statistics’ teacher’s note. It proved futile for my GPA, so I stopped after two. Because I wasn't reading them much. Maybe I should have printed more, like how my father did when he was doing his master.

As I was clearing my stack, I found a large box in my father’s bedroom with all his school stuffs (and my mom’s school stuffs. Yes, our academic hoarding instinct might be genetic). There was bounded copies of other people’s notes, textbooks, Matlab and R documentation, Latex tutorials, academic papers… Perhaps that’s why he was able to get into the Dean’s list, while I wasn't.

I threw them all. Well, almost all.