Year in Review

This year I learned a lot and had plenty of fun doing so. Sometimes some materials were hard to get into, but I pushed forward and ended up liking them a lot more. This year I did coursework on TJEd High, an online program for deep learning and leadership education for youth. In it I read assigned books, and posted thoughts about them on the discussion forums, and discussed interesting things about the books and our ideas on the forums. The course also had videos where instructors discussed books and principles, and gave inspiring "mid-week mentoring". The course put a heavy emphasis on reading classics, thinking deeply about them, and discussing them with others. It attempts to help us better our thinking, enabling us to have the deep, creative, analytical, and innovative thinking that can help us solve problems in the real world.  It was really fun thinking, and discussing the books. You can learn more through these links: learning.tjed.org, tjed.org . The books chosen included math classics, government classics, and other classics.  Some of the books I read include:
Mr. Bowditch, the Giver, Turn the Page, TJEd for Teens, Sword in the Stone, Alas Babylon, We Hold These Truths, Animal Farm, The Final Summit, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Travelers Gift and The Tools of Money; we also read short works like: If, A Mathematicians lament, Invitation to the pain of learning, A world Split Apart, the Inner Ring and the Road not Taken. Some books I read but did not finish include: the Prince, Anne of Green Gables, 1913, The coming aristocracy, Bendigo Shafter, Great Speeches by Native Americans and some essays by Emerson. You can read my posts and discussion here ( you may need to change your browser for it to load). You can see some of the discussion's I have had in my last blog post.

TJEd high helps me learn how to think, and write, and also has helped me learn more about math.
The books measuerment and Arithmetic by Lockhart are interesting ways to learn math. I have read a bit of them , and have thought up fun problems like they encourage. Here is one of them which I have solved:

Take a circle. Put an equilateral triangle in the center of it, with all three points on the circumference. Then put a square inside the triangle, connecting it to one of the sides of it. What fraction of the circle's area does the square take up? What is Square Area/Circle Area ?

You need to use the 30-60-90 triangle law to solve it. 

I have also taken two AP exams, AP Computer Science A and AP English Language, and earned a 5 and 4 on them respectively. They gave me 6 hrs of college credit and Eng fulfilled first-year writing GE requirement for BYU. 

I have been running in the morning usually between 1-3 miles, and drawing with my grandpa. I learned Bulgarian with him earlier in the year. I entered the Youthful Expressions art competition and the NAA Young and Budding Artists show, won a prize in the Youthful Expressions, and a honorable mention in NAA. I have also been playing the piano a bunch, and refereeing at ECYSA.