Ok so to be honest, the past few weeks haven’t been the most exciting weeks of my life, no traveling and A LOT of work. I am not sure how many hours I have spent in the library but it is started to look more familiar to me than my bedroom. At the beginning of the year, the Undergraduate Dean told us that because we are all full time students, we should being doing schoolwork for about 40 hours a week. At first, I thought that this was slightly ridiculous and meant to scare us, but I have found it to be true. To give you an idea of what life is like, I have a friend who told me that he writes down the number of hours he spends in the library each day and tries to outdo himself each day. While this was my attitude up until yesterday, I can now somewhat taste freedom or perhaps relative normalcy. You see, for the past three weeks I have had a total of 4 papers, 2 presentations, 4 problem sets, about 2,000 pages of reading, and work each Sunday. Having finished all of this, I no longer have the extra work. To be honest, it feels a little strange spending all of the extra time in my room- so far, I have completed one 600 page novel.
As I mentioned before, a few weeks ago, I began teaching an SAT Class at the London Kaplan Center in Leicester Square. In theory, this is nothing new to me as I have taught classes in both Queens and Brooklyn, but I have found my experience in London to be quite different. The first difference was that few kids in the class had heard of Kaplan before and few had taken any sort of test prep before. In New York especially, it is common to take an SAT like class for the Specialized High School Exam so that come SAT time everyone understands the format of test prep classes. Additionally, in the US it is assumed that as a high school junior you are going to take the SATs at some point. For these kids, it was a conscious decision to prepare for the SATs. I began the first class by having each student explain why they wanted to take the SATs. Answered varied from I want to go to an American University to I’m not exactly sure but it looks cool on television. Some of the students only temporarily live in the UK so they plan to return to the United States. Considering the drastic difference in price ($9,000 compared with at least $50,000) it is amazing that US universities still have an edge. They found it incredibly strange that I chose to travel across the Atlantic to study for the year. The other thing I realized was how much the SAT and the Kaplan book in particular requires American-specific knowledge. For instance, none of the students had heard of PEMDAS and few understood what absolute value was, two concepts that are taught quite early in the US. Moreover, the students found it incredibly difficult to complete a math problem that assumed that the test taker knew that 12 inches are in a foot. Many of the students began to convert into metric. There were a few other issues, but to be honest, I feel that if they want to study in the US, the class is a good crash course in American education. Unlike in other social situations, I do not avoid using American phrases and I continuously find myself saying college instead of university. I speak at a normal pace and only annunciate in my normal manner.
At the Kaplan Center
Trying to relax and watch Mad Men
