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Email Etiquette
By James H. Choi
http://column.SabioAcademy.com
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Dear Sabio Students,
You might raise your eyebrows at the suggestion of me teaching you how to write an email. But many students lack etiquette. They are not rude, just clueless, and etiquetteless. As you apply to colleges, you will need it.
You’ll be selling yourself. The schools will decide to buy the most professionally behaving students. Show them how organized and polite you are in any emails you send them, and repeat this for the teachers you expect to recommend you to leave an imprint of “professionalism” in the reader’s mind.
- Use a subject line to highlight the email’s content. Too many times I get emails stating the senders’ names in the subject. I can see your name quite well in the “From” field. I don’t need you to repeat it. Besides, what you’re writing is not about you; it only concerns you. What you have to realize is that those who receive a lot of emails have to sift through them all to find a single one. When you write only your name redundantly in the subject line, you frustrate your reader, who neither cares nor learns anything about your name in the subject line. If you are asking for a favor, such as “Please help me get admitted to a college,” make this clear in the subject line. Because if you make the recipient unclear what all your emails are about, you’re less likely to get any favors done for you.
- Don’t send an email with your name in non-readable script, and expect to be treated favorably. That is, if you come from a country where the script is not the Roman alphabet, which English (and French, Spanish, Portuguese, and so on) uses to write, then make sure your name shows up in this Roman alphabet as well. Roman type is the script franca of the world. Any computer in the world defaults to showing the script franca, so anyone you are writing will be able to at least make out some sounds to your name — no matter how weird it seems to them. If you have two sets of friends with mutually exclusive scripts, then use both scripts: one script first then put the other scripts in parentheses, or vice versa. Never send an email knowing the receiver cannot even read your name. That’s rude.
- If you get an email with a “CC” (i.e. “carbon copy”), that’s because a third person needed to see this email. For instance, a teacher might send a student an email saying he or she needs to turn in an essay right away and also CC the student’s parents so the parents know about the situation. Whenever you reply to an email with someone in the CC field, give it a thought if it’s proper to reply to the whole group so that the CC-ed person is not left wondering if you replied or not. You can reply to everyone by hitting “reply all,” which takes some effort to remember. But you should. If a counselor emails you to inform you that you’re late submitting an application, the faster all people — counselor, parents, principal, university officers — who have been CC-ed know you’ve replied, the more beneficial that will be to your application.
- But, at the same time, be aware of everyone copied on an email. Because this could involve politics. There may be cases when you don’t want to announce your reply to everyone on the list. In that case, don’t use “Reply All.” But the main point is, you must pay attention to the people in CC field and make a conscious decision.
- Speaking of politics. If you want other people except for the recipient to know that you sent an email, then put those other people’s email address on the BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) field. The recipient won’t know and don’t have a way to Reply All to those hidden people. This is what you would do when you want to prove to your parents that you emailed your school counselor. You put the counselor’s email in the To field, and then your parents in the BCC field. If you want your parents to also see the reply, then you put them in the CC field. If your counselor knows how to use email, he/she will “Reply All.” If not, you will have to forward the reply to your parents.
- don’t use in4mal abbreviations when ur riting formally. If you’re in a superior position, of course you can get away with anything. The boss of a company, for instance, can make a typo in an email. But if you’re not the boss or superior person in an email, then using these abbreviations invites the superior person to judge you. You should use the most polite language you know, double-check your spelling, check your grammar, and certainly don’t abbreviate anything.
- Keep copies of all correspondence. When you reply to an email, all past correspondence is automatically shown at the bottom. This can get long, and looks really ugly and messy. But leave it there. This provides a record of the flow of the conversation. If someone forgets what transpired between you and her, she’ll be able to look at the whole conversation right there instead of having to search through dozens of emails — all of which list your name as the subject.
- Edit your subject line as you reply back and forth. Here’s an example of one set of email replies:
- Student’s original subject line: “Feb. 29 Homework: Lesson 5, Questions 49 – 79, Odds Only.”
- Teacher’s edited subject line: “Feb. 29 Homework, Redo #71-79.”
- Student’s new subject line: “Feb. 29 Homework, #71-79 Revised”
- Teacher’s final subject line: “Feb. 29 Homework Total Grade”
At the time you’re writing the emails, doing so might seem tedious, but the value of editing your subject lines will become evident if you have to go back through your emails two years later — your organization skill will shine through. Always imagine what you’d be looking for if you had to find this email two years from now; make that the subject.
As you run larger organizations interacting with more people, this kind of information management skill will determine the amount of information you can handle, thus how high you can rise. Those who are working with you will see your effectiveness as well, and they will trust you with more information in turn. In the information economy, the one who manages information better wins.
How to Prepare for Math Competitions
How to Prepare for Math Competitions
By James H. Choi
http://column.SabioAcademy.com
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Dear Sabio Students,
Many of you want to do better in math competitions. This desire often becomes more pronounced after you participate in an on-site competition, such as HMMT (Harvard MIT Math Tournament) or ARML (American Regional Math League). I think what motivates you in this type of competitions is sitting in the same locations in which the results are published, the scores are graded, and the awards are given. All of this happens on the same day and in the same spot, which makes the competition feel similar to other sports competition. Particularly in the HMMT Guts round, where you can actually see your school’s score displayed in real time on a scoreboard, the tournament feels as close as math can get to a sports game.
Even students who have been studying all along with me suddenly ask me after these events, “How can I do well in math competitions?” There is sincerity and desire in their voices.
I will tell you how to do well. For you to do well in math, first you have to have basics down. This includes your ability to do simple computations: adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing. If you’re not good at this, you can use NextMath to improve your speed.
Once you have these simple computations down, you will need to know certain numbers. For example, what is 27? You have to know it’s 128 without blinking. Same thing goes for 210, 162, and 192. You have to know all these numbers. Fortunately, there are only about 30 of these numbers, but you need to know how to handle them. For example, 152 is 225. Knowing this, would you be able to tell me what 1.52 is? (Many students say it’s 22.5, but the answer is 2.25.) All these memorizations you can easily practice and firm up by using NextMath. These may take weeks to months to master, depending on how prepared you are. Some extremely well-prepared students take only a day to ensure they’re well-versed in these numbers. After you do this yourself, you can begin to prepare for the actual competition.
Most importantly to prepare for math competitions, you have to solve problems — but not in the way you think. I will tell you how to solve problems so your scores will rise. First and foremost, you must solve each problem yourself. If you look at a problem’s solution, you might nod your head and believe that you understand it, but you will not improve one bit studying that way. You have to bang on the rocks with your eggshell head over and over until you solve the problem yourself. Of course, depending on each test, this is a very difficult task. So in these difficult cases, you should not look at the solutions but rather learn the required knowledge to solve the problem.
Of course, this required knowledge feels like a bottomless pit of math to learn. The subject is so vast, and you don’t know where to start. You might have as many as six math books, which are daunting to go through just to do well in one math competition. Besides, you might have been motivated just a few days before the test. So what do you do?
The best action is to go through my knowledge-based lectures. When I make math lectures, I separate the basic required knowledge for math problems into both knowledge-based lectures and actual solutions to each problem, or solution-based problems. Do not watch the lectures about specifically how to solve one problem first; but do watch the generic knowledge-based lectures. Afterward, ponder about the problem. That will improve you. This is equivalent to studying from a math book, except I’ve pre-selected which section you should study for each specific problem. This knowledge-based approach to learning math is more efficient and immediately gratifying than learning how to solve just one problem.
Similarly, solving each problem yourself — rather than watching a teacher solve it — is an obvious way to answer your math questions. If you think about sports, the analogy couldn’t be clearer. If you want to get stronger and hire a personal trainer, would they lift all the weights for you while you watch them, nodding your head vigorously? No! They stand by and yell at you. “You can do it! Three more!” And all that yelling and screaming is so that you do the job. To find out how top math coaches around the United States coached their students into becoming champions, I asked them every time I meet them at large math competition events. And they all said the same thing: They make students solve problems. They don’t teach, and if they do teach, that’s hardly a big part of the students’ training at all. Great coaches are not those who teach more, but rather those who make students solve more problems. It might sound odd until you compare with sports: The great personal trainer is the one who makes you lift weights. (Duh!) What else could they do? Lift it for you? Same thing in math.
One of the best ways to begin to practice for competitions is to take a test that is easier than the one of your competition. For example, if you are preparing for AMC 10, take AMC 8 first. Go through the problems without looking at the solutions one-by-one. You will of course check if you got the questions right at the end, but you will first solve them. If you are truly stuck about what to do, then look at my knowledge-base lectures. There you will become equipped to fight this problem. It’s the equivalent of being faced with a big cliff you cannot jump over, but being given the right tool, such as a ladder, to do so. You will find in my lectures a ladder you can use to push yourself with your own feet over this cliff. The ladder becomes your tool, which you can take to other cliffs afterward. This is how other students do it. This is not cheating, taking ladders from my lectures, but rather how you gain problem-solving skills.
Even if you get the question after pondering, still look at my knowledge-base lectures. You might find you solved the problem the harder way. Instead of taking 30 seconds, you might have spent 10 minutes. Yes, you got the right answer, but you might have missed the essence completely, which happens quite often in competition problems.
One method I learned from my own student is to take a blank notebook along with one sheet from one test, such as AMC 10 or AMC 12 or AIME (American Invitational Math Exam) to practice. Put down each date you begin to work, and start solving the problems one-by-one. Write down each problem number, and keep track of all the dead-end solutions that don’t work. That notebook will become a massive body of knowledge for you to look back to. Also, it will give you a true sense of accomplishment when you look back on how you’ve improved your knowledge.
Raising your math-competition scores is actually quite simple; it’s no different from losing weight or gaining muscle. If you consume fewer calories than you expend, then you lose weight. If you keep lifting ever heavier weights, your muscles will develop. There’s no way around this. The same applies to math. You solve problems without cheating — that is, without looking at the solutions first — and you keep trying till you crack each one, then your brain will form mathematical muscles, and you will get stronger and score higher. There’s no other way around this.
However, the issue is motivation. Everybody knows they should exercise and eat sensibly, and yet people are gaining weight because they are not motivated enough to act on what they know. That’s one problem with math-competition preparation as well. After a while, you lose steam, and sitting in a hall solving math problems seems like such a boring thing, and blah blah blah. So how do you motivate yourself?
Use that notebook, which should be getting thicker. It should be like watching your bank account grow, making you want to save even more knowledge in there. And participate in all math competitions. It will be a good measure of your improvement, thus motivate you further.
To summarize, here is what you can do to prepare for math competitions:
- First, decide which test you want to take and start practicing by taking a test one level lower. Build up from here.
- Never look at the solution first; try to solve the problem yourself. It is not uncommon to spend a day or two holding on to one problem. Modern students who are used to the routine of solving many simple problems might find this hard. But if you never overcome this time expenditure, never get into the habit of spending hours and days solving one difficult problem, you will not be able to do well on math competitions.
- If you need help, look at other books or see my knowledge-base lectures, which will pinpoint the exact knowledge you will need without showing you how to solve a particular problem. That part you have to do — because it is your muscle you want to strengthen.
- If you are truly stuck on a problem, then move on. Go to the next one, and return to this one later. But the key is, crack each problem yourself.
Remember: This could take you hours, days, maybe weeks to solve a single problem. I’m not exaggerating. That’s normal. That’s how it’s done.
Get started now, not tomorrow, and start your preparation to dominate the world.
Redundant expressions peeve me
Redundant expressions peeve me
By James H. Choi
http://column.SabioAcademy.com
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“I love you for sentimental reasons” is the title of a beautiful song from a bygone era, the 1920s.
But, whenever I hear it, I wonder what other reasons are there to love someone: Financial? Social? Psychological? I don’t know. But I find it disturbing that the lyricist specified the reasons.
In general, tautological redundancies bother me a great deal. Apparently I am not the only one. Once while visiting Brazil, my friend and I drove down a highway from São Paulo to Santos, which was displaying a sign:
This highway is monitored by electronic radar.
“What other type of radar exist?” I immediately asked my friend as soon as I saw the sign.
Before my friend could answer, his wife jumped in.
“You know, James,” she excited exclaimed pointing at my friend, “he asked the same question the first time he passed the sign! And he got pretty upset about it, too. Like you!”
It must have amused her to see two men getting upset in the identical manner at the same high way sign, just because of its redundant expression. I guess it runs among friends. But seriously, are there biological radars? Chemical radars? Why specify electric ones? Redundant expressions peeve me. Maybe you don’t understand why I am so worked up about “sentimental reasons” and “electronic radar.” See if the following example does not bother you.
“His female mother verbally told him that there would be a musical orchestra playing Asian Chinese music that night after dark.”
It bothered you, right?
Catching this type of redundancies and contractions (“Believing superstitions brings bad luck”) is a sign that you are actually understanding the sentence. Those who are oblivious to these details are also the ones who score low in the reading comprehension tests. See if you can find what’s wrong with this one: “Virtue is my strongest virtue.”
Overall, being alert to redundancies, oxymoron, tautologies is a sign that you are actually understanding the meaning of the sentences you hear. It is also a great way to increase your body’s stress hormone level, raise blood pressure, and trigger other biological reactions that shorten life. Just great.
My students, can you think of any other redundant, and/or tautological sentences you saw that would drive me up the wall? Feel free to post below actual (the ones you saw) or creative (the ones you made up) examples. Let’s see who manages to peeve me the most.
Mental Arithmetic Works Only in One Language
Summary: Even if a person is multilingual, he/she is likely to be monolingual when it comes to mental arithmetic.
Mental Arithmetic Works Only in One Language
By James H. Choi
http://column.SabioAcademy.com
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<My mother, who was educated during the Japanese colonization of Korea, computes in Japanese. That is, she solves a numerical problem by murmuring Japanese multiplication tables yet producing the answer in Korean. Funnily, she uses no Japanese on any other occasion. After becoming multilingual, I've learned the same thing happens to me: I still compute in Korean. Despite being able to think and communicate in other languages, invariably whenever I manipulate numbers, I have to compute them in Korean before translating the answer into the language I am using.
Maybe this is something done only in my family. Yet a friend's daughter, after taking an immersive Spanish course, found she needed to compute numbers in Spanish before translating back to English. So I guess this runs in more than one family.
Actually, I can actually compute in more than one language. But that's because of the tens of thousands of hours I have spent tutoring students in mathematics in English, I necessarily began being able to compute in English. But the time I've spent pondering English multiplication tables is more than most people spend learning multiplication tables in their first languages. Yet when I'm not constrained to thinking in English, my computation always reverts back to Korean.
Malcolm Gladwell speculates in The Outliers that Asians compute more easily because their language expresses one number in one phoneme only. “Seven,” for instance, is two syllables. Whereas in Chinese, a digit of a number can only ever be one syllable. Languages that adopted Chinese counting, such as Korean, share the same trait. Whereas Romantic languages, such as English and Portuguese, allow for multiple syllables as in se-ven (7) or no-ve (9). Incidentally, the Japanese language’s adoption of Chinese counting does not always result in monosyllabic words for each number. For example 7 becomes shi-chi and 8 becomes ha-chi. And also, native Korean language’s counting system is not monosyllabic either. One is ha-na, five is da-seot, 7 is il-gob, etc. Japanese native counting system also is multisyllabic. 1, 2, 3 becomes hi-to-tsu, fu-ta-tsu, mi-tsu, for example. Thus, it is only the Chinese counting system that is monosyllabic.
According to Malcolm Gladwell, a student learning Chinese multiplication tables has an advantage because he/she gets to learn them with just one-syllable numbers, whereas a Portuguese student must learn multiplication tables with much lengthier numbers. This theoretically makes the non-Asian student’s learning harder. I am not sure how true that is, although the hypothesis is really fascinating.
Because of the phenomenon I mentioned above, one gets to learn multiplication tables only once. Thus this is not something that can be reversed at a later date. Is our arithmetic ability, not mathematical ability, really marked by the language with which we first learn it? It is a fascinating question indeed. At the same time, even if it were true, there is not much one can do to take advantage of it.
Please share your experiences/thoughts in multi-lingual arithmetic and in the comment box below.
Where to store your important data?
Where to store your important data?
By James H. Choi
http://column.SabioAcademy.com
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During the Industrial Revolution, factories were required to own private generators because they could not trust utility companies to provide them with enough or reliable electricity to operate. The same sentiment was true in the early days of Internet: Everybody wanted to hold his or her own documents in private computers. Companies wanted to hold mail servers inside their systems. It was unthinkable anyone would upload financial data to the Internet so that tax-reporting companies to carry out tax services online. In fact, it was unthinkable to use credit cards online.
The sentiment has changed. We don’t think twice about outsourcing our email servers online, paying with credit cards, and uploading personal and high-security information. I don’t know what the long-term repercussions of this trend will be.
But if you have important documents today, such as college-application essays, you must store these online — not just on your local hard drive because there are only two types of hard drives: One that failed, and one that will fail.
Your hard drive will lose all data at the most inconvenient time. For example, it will breakdown minutes before you submit your college-application essays. Would you like to rewrite the whole thing again? No, so don’t trust your hard drive. Trust the hard drives online. These backed up your data in more than one drive, so even if one hard drive fails, you won’t even notice. Even if online storage company suffers a catastrophic failure, such as the whole building being destroyed, your data will come back soon because they store it on several locations.
You can upload all your important data to online hard drives several ways. First, try Dropbox. It’s easy and free for up to 2GB. What’s best about Dropbox is that you don’t have to change any of your habits. Once you install this software, any file you save into a specified folder is saved online in the Dropbox hard drive automatically. You can access the same file from several computers, or even access them from your smartphone and from other computers at anywhere.
A second option is to work online, such as on Google Docs. It is also free. The downside is that they have less features, and they tend to slow down when the data/files get too big.
Some of these services are not free. For example, Dropbox charges $9.99/month for 50GB of online storage. Here’s a way to decide a fair price: Suppose you lost all your data today. How much would you pay to bring back the data you lost? You should be willing to pay 1/100 this amount every month to have your data backed up online.
Some large data, such as photo or video files, are too expensive to store online. For these, buy two external hard drives. The inconvenient part is that it’s hard to synchronize (automatically have an exact copy) small changes you make every minute while editing or working on the document. So put any files you’re working on into your Dropbox folder. And when you’re done working on the project and ready to archive it, just pull it out of Dropbox and put it onto your external hard drives. Two drives with identical contents, one at home and one at another location to guard against a catastrophic loss — such as fire or flood — at one location. This frees up your Dropbox space for more changing files.
External hard drives cost a lot, but think about what it would feel like to lose every document, video, photo, and audio file you have ever created. What would you pay to get these back? Considering this, the price of external storage is pretty cheap. By the way, it may make you feel better to know that these drives used to cost ten times as much only a few years back.
Managing your information is a critically important skill in this information age. And designing your life in such a way that you will never have to waste time looking for, or recovering lost files would automatically boost your productivity far ahead of your accident-prone, fate-blaming peers.
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