Eighth Grade: Mind-bendingly fun!

I haven’t been posting much because I’ve had so much to do, and it just now occurs to me that I should be posting because I have so much to do. Summer went by pretty fast, and by now I’m a few months into eighth grade. How’s it going, you may ask?

Pretty well! It’s definitely a lot more fun than seventh grade was; the things I’m learning in my advanced electives and outside of school are finally connecting to my on-grade classes. (I got visibly excited when my science teacher showed a video by my favorite chemistry YouTube channel, which you can find here.) English is my new hardest class, as it focuses less on grammar or writing and more on deep thinking. Hence the name of this post!

I’m the most excited about an elective called Video Game Creation, where we’re currently building a space shooter game in Unity. Finally, Competitive Math is a little different this year. Since it’s a bit hard to learn about advanced math concepts like we did last year, we rarely meet for lessons all together and simply work on our own math-related projects. My friend and I, the only two eighth graders in the high school class, are working our way through the AMC8 contests from the year we were born to the present! At the end of our project, we have to present our final result. We have three free-period/elective slots this year, which means that I can do both these electives and still have one period to get homework done!

Okay, enough about school. My swim team has started going to swim meets again, but not in a way you might think. We have week-long virtual swim meets via a special app that records our times and allows us to compete with other teams as far away as New Zealand and Taiwan! Since July, I’ve been breaking my own records in various virtual swim meets and meeting my goals along the way. The app is called Swimmingly, and there’s a companion app called Swimmingly Fan where swimmers and their friends/family can check out their times. I’m still swimming three days a week (and sometimes more!) while following rules designed to keep us swimmers safe.

To close out this post, I’d like to show you all my video from Saturday’s Falcon 9 launch! My mom and I watched it lift off from just outside of Lompoc, California, which coincidentally held the Coastal Championships I went to earlier this year. It was the first time I’ve ever seen a rocket launch in person, and I would absolutely recommend that to anyone!

I hope everyone reading enjoyed this rather long-winded post, and I’m glad to be back!