Note: if you are a prospective OTIS student, read the syllabus instead. More useful, less bragging. In the unlikely event that I’m a social gathering like a party or family gathering, people will sometimes ask me about my teaching. Invariably they ask, “so do you do like 1:1 meetings or group lessons?”. Then I have… Continue reading Things I’ve learned from running OTIS
Tag: teaching
A story of a town
This was originally a diary entry, but I showed it to some students who told me I should put it in my blog instead. Imagine you’ve moved to a new town, and want to explore the local offerings, because there’s a lot to do and see, and you’re expecting to live here a while. The… Continue reading A story of a town
Yet another reason I don’t give much generic advice
So I have an FAQ now for contest-studying advice, but there’s a “frequently used answer” that I want to document now that doesn’t fit in the FAQ format because the question looks different to everyone that asks it. The questions generally have the same shape: “would it be better to do X or Y when… Continue reading Yet another reason I don’t give much generic advice
Slice of life of the OTIS GM
Here’s a snapshot of what running OTIS looks like these days. Starts from last Sunday afternoon until Monday lunch. Timestamps indicate when the action was completed (rather than started). Sunday 13:04: Process a late financial aid request from someone who forgot to request it earlier. Sunday 13:14: Edit OTIS website to clarify that if you… Continue reading Slice of life of the OTIS GM
Agency
Sometimes my OTIS students suggest features or things for the OTIS website, and I reply “submit a pull request”. I’m usually half-joking when I say this, because I acknowledge that I’m essentially saying “please do the work for me”. But part of me isn’t joking. Because, one of the things I’ve grown to most value… Continue reading Agency
What I would add to the K-12 list
I often gripe about how standard K-12 education is overly focused on specific knowledge (how to solve a quadratic, memorizing dates for history, etc.) rather than general skills (e.g. "how to figure out how to solve a quadratic"). On the other hand, I understand why; teaching general skills is much more difficult than preparing a… Continue reading What I would add to the K-12 list
Pride
Sometimes people ask me how many of my students made the IMO, and if I’m in a bad mood I often give the super snarky reply, “I lost track”.1 That’s actually a white lie. The real answer is “I deliberately don’t keep track”. And in this post I want to explain why. It’s definitely human… Continue reading Pride
New handout: Intro to Proofs for the Morbidly Curious
Downloadable at https://web.evanchen.cc/handouts/NaturalProof/NaturalProof.pdf. I don't know why I thought to write this, but it's been bugging me for a year or two now that I've never seen the answer to "what is a proof" written out quite this way. So here you go. It's a bit weird for me to be writing an article that… Continue reading New handout: Intro to Proofs for the Morbidly Curious
The silver lining
A while ago someone asked me how COVID had affected the students I worked with. I replied that, on average, the pandemic had tripled my students' productivity. And I'm gonna brag about it like the proud teacher I am.
Sometimes the best advice is no advice
信言不美，美言不信。 I get a lot of questions that are so general that there is no useful answer I can give, e.g., "how do I get better at geometry?". What do you want from me? Go do more problems, sheesh. These days, in my instructions for contacting me, I tell people to be as specific as… Continue reading Sometimes the best advice is no advice
Power Overwhelming 