Chapter Fifteen: Bring a camera… or a phone (~jinghan)

What do Jinghan’s dread? Jinghan’s dread 3:15-5:15 statistics tutorials with a computer lab component. Uh huh. Brings back bad memories of probability tutorials where I would franticly try and keep up with what other people were doing, by which I mean I would spend the whole class going “huh? What does that mean? What’s this asking for? I don’t remember this from the lecture. How did you get that answer?”

Perhaps I would have felt better about it if I had looked at the tutorial questions the previous night instead of on the train in the morning resulting in illegibly scribbled-in margins, a headache and mild travel nausea. (Or if I hadn’t made a child cry while being too eager about maths during my voluntary classroom mentoring for In2Science in the morning…)

And yet dread never stopped 3:15 from arriving. (It never does. I’ve tried.)

However I did have a secret weapon I had forgotten about: despite dread, once I’m in a situation with people, nothing embarrasses the Jinghan, especially not attracting attention to herself talking to strangers and asking them questions while they’re trying to mind their own business. And so that’s how it started.

“Hey did you do question three? I got this far, but then I’m totally stumped. Here’ll I’ll write what I was thinking on the board!” (No one else is working at the board despite the tutor’s encouragements, but don’t forget: nothing embarrasses the Jinghan.)

And soon people are telling me answers, and giving me hints, and even writing stuff up for me! I have a brilliant time and learnt stuff and got to know some people. So a shout out to you all to be interactive in tutes, even if you don’t work at the board, knowing people makes a subject much less daunting and makes tutorials much more constructive.

And thanks to the wonders of digital technology you even get to keep (and share) your notes: