Preface

It’s been almost a month since my last weekly journal. My friends have been bugging me to update again, so here I am, obediently back at it. Although it’s called a “weekly” journal, I definitely don’t write every week. Rather than a fixed schedule, it’s more like “I write when I feel like it”—that suits my rhythm better.

Cram School

It’s been almost three months since I started working at the cram school. The pay is good, and the work isn’t too stressful, so I’ll probably stick with it for a while.

Before Midterms

High school students are all the same—barely any questions most of the time, but right before exams, they come flooding in. The power of last-minute cramming is truly impressive; suddenly, everyone has something to ask. We used to do the same back in the day.

The past exam questions they’re using now look almost identical to the ones I had, except that the current ones have watermarks while the ones from my high school didn’t. I’m not saying I miss doing tests, but watching them work through those papers really triggers those long-dead memories in my brain.

We used to categorize test papers like this:

Chien-Kung, First, Kaohsiung, Tainan First, Wuling, NTNU Affiliated: the impossible ones, where you have no clue what’s going on.
Taipei First Girls, Taichung Girls: messy numbers, requires technical calculation.
Wen-Hua, Hsing-Fu: around actual difficulty level.
others: warm-up material

Maybe my subconscious made those categories too clear—because now, whenever I see a girls’ school exam… I honestly don’t want to touch it. Don’t ask me why!

To Teach or Not to Teach

After being at the cram school for a while, I started wondering: what’s the best way to teach them? Some things feel weird to teach, but not teaching them also feels wrong.

• Geogebra
  It’s a graphing tool that visualizes equations instantly. So far, no one at the cram school seems to know about it. Every time I run into a question with a complicated graph, I hesitate: should I draw it on my tablet or have them sketch it by hand?
  From a test-taking standpoint, of course you can’t use the software—but without seeing the graph, it’s hard to draw it correctly. My current approach: if I’m too lazy to sketch, I’ll just use Geogebra. Maybe I’ll formally introduce it later.

• Photomath
  The ultimate calculator. It handles $sin$, $cos$, $\Sigma$, $\int$, even matrices—basically anything you can type, it can solve¹. It even shows step-by-step solutions. I’ve used it privately when tutoring but haven’t officially introduced it. If I do, they might rely on it too much. Some students actually learn from the steps—but most just copy the answers.

Golden Shield Award

The preliminary round had 30 multiple-choice questions. A lot of the reverse-engineering ones went completely over my head, so I just guessed my way through them. As expected, I didn’t make it to the next round. I knew the moment I walked out of the exam room. Haven’t run into my advisor yet to tell him, though. A reverse a day keeps the zero-days away. I’ll try again over winter break. For now, juggling reversing practice and schoolwork is proving difficult.

Guitar Club

Now it’s time to get busy with the Christmas performance. This time I was assigned to stage management—basically, tuning instruments and setting up gear. Usually, there’s not much to do, so I signed up to play three songs. Out of those, two are guitar-heavy and both have solos, so I hope I can finish practicing in time. Because of the typhoon, we lost one rehearsal, meaning next week’s verification round is our “one shot, one kill.” Time to work hard.

Club Lesson

Next week, it’s my turn to teach during club class. Teaching people who’ve never touched a guitar before… honestly makes me a bit nervous. To prepare, I sat in on the last few sessions. After watching, I realized—watching doesn’t help. You only learn by doing. I’ll just improvise on stage.

From observing the audience, I noticed that their skill levels vary a lot. Some are experienced players, some are halfway there, and some are total beginners. To balance it out, I decided to teach Mayday’s Embrace². It only has four chords and a simple strumming pattern. Not much to ask—hopefully, everyone can make some sound within two hours.

Event Info

Poster not yet released

• Location: NCHU Small Auditorium
• Time: 12/02 (Tue) 18:30 - 21:30

Exam Archive System

This week, Each Chen finished building the NCHU Applied Math Exam Archive System. My part was just making the favicon, changing the front-end background, and contributing some past exams. Next up, I’m designing the system’s Social Card—the preview image that shows when you share the link.

The concept: a stick figure fighting against math. We’re the ones getting beaten up by the monster called “mathematics.” Once we’re strong enough to fight back, we graduate. The image is still in my head for now—but I’ll draw it in the next couple of days.

Keyboard

Recently, my L key has been acting up, and it’s affecting me quite a lot. Ever since setting up Affine, I’ve been taking all my notes there. Without my laptop, I basically can’t study. Because of that, my typing speed has improved a little, though I haven’t had time to test it on TypingClub yet.

Anyway, my L key is really dying. If I press too lightly, nothing shows up; at normal force, it works maybe 70% of the time. I’m planning to get an external mechanical keyboard—something with a better feel. I saw one I liked at Tien-Huang: the Logi Pop Keys.

I actually noticed it back when the semester started, but now I really need it. So I went to Nova to shop around, hoping I’d find it—or maybe something better. Nope. Walked the entire mall, checked multiple stores—nothing, or too expensive. Finally, I asked the library store. The result:

The purple one has been discontinued.

Gave up. I’ll just stick with my old one. Only pink and yellow-black versions are left—so yeah, not switching.

RSS

I don’t usually follow the news, so I completely missed the recent typhoon warning. That day, I was just chatting with a senior about exam papers:

Got any past exams?
：Nope
We’re doomed then
：You can pray for a typhoon day

Huh? What? A typhoon?? I was totally disconnected from the world. It’s rare to have typhoons in November, but I had no clue one was coming.

Nowadays, I get all my updates through RSS. Naturally, I went to check if the Central Deception Bureau³ had any RSS feeds. Turns out—they actually do:
Here it is.

Each region has its own RSS: alerts, warnings—covering typhoons, earthquakes, heavy rain, cold waves, fog, and more. No need to read the news anymore. It even automatically posts weekly forecasts, daily weather, and rain probabilities. I instantly subscribed to Taichung’s feed. Goodbye, news.