Eric Guan
had a long academic career, still learning
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What’s the most original thing you’ve heard today?
On my anniversary with my fiancée in August 2018, she planned a scavenger hunt for me at our home. Each clue formed part of a romantic poem, evoking memories that we made since moving in together. An excerpt: Four years together, And you know all I like to eat; Which drawer should I open, If I want a rea…
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Have you ever visited your childhood home or school as an adult just to see how it has changed?
I’ve visited near some of my old neighbourhoods and schools as an adult. Most recently, I visited a city where I used to live 10–20 years before, and I hit up a number of neighbourhoods from my time there. * Near one of my homes used to be a public outdoors tennis court, and my family, friends, and I w…
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How do I greet the audience of a school in a debate?
When I participated in or watched academic debates in school, each participant generally greeted everyone at the beginning of their first speech. Something like, “Good morning/afternoom/evening to Mister/Madam Moderator/Speaker, our experienced judges, our honourable audience, and of course, our wor…
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What does it mean when a teacher tells you to sit in the front of the class?
This only happened once to me as far as I recall. It was during a high school class, when the teacher pointed out that a classmate sitting at the front of the class was socializing too much with the students around him, disrupting the lesson. That classmate happened to be sitting in the second row f…
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Why do you go to school and play games?
I’ll interpret the question as asking why I was personally willing to participate in games at school, where school staff hosted such games. I liked playing games at school mostly because of the possible scale of the games as a result of gathering 20 or more classmates as players. Outside school, I co…
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Can you give an example of when a student got extra credit from their teacher and what they did to deserve it?
In terms of receiving a sort of bonus assignment from a teacher that they didn’t initially plan to give, then I’ve gotten extra credit more than once. One instance I can think of was in relation to a language arts assignment, where I received a lower grade than expected. My teacher had left comments…
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What are three things that you like best about your school and three things about your school that you would like to change?
Some stuff comes to mind for what I liked and would’ve changed about my elementary school. I’ll answer from what I think what my point of view was at the time I attended school, not necessarily from my current POV as someone who had left school years ago. What I liked: 1. My school had a hallway that dou…
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Is it significant for schools when students do not pass their classes?
My elementary school didn’t really define what would happen if a student failed a class, and I don’t know of any classmates who actually failed a specific class in elementary, so I’ll answer for my high school. The school administration had different policies and procedures depending on the class. Ou…
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Should schools prioritize teaching children life skills over academic subjects that may not be applicable in their future?
By late high school, I definitely had the thought that my schooling up to that point should’ve covered more life skills. At the time, I was actually taking a life skills course that my high school happened to offer, but the course was not well known and none of my friends also took it. My life skills…
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What is the strangest thing you've ever done at school?
Aside from escaping detention back in elementary school, I did have a reputation during high school for being unpredictably quirky, but otherwise serious and formal almost all the time. Once just before class when almost everyone except the teacher was present, I was talking to one of my classmates w…
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Do parent-teacher meetings make a significant impact on a student's overall performance?
In my case, parent-teacher meetings didn’t always have much positive impact on my performance, though it could’ve been due to clashing of viewpoints and interpretations from the teachers, my parents, and myself. * In elementary school, I consistently got good grades that often didn’t matter much anyway…
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What are some rules in your school that you are certain other schools don't have?
Maybe this wasn’t a strict rule, but my closest friend’s parents treated it like one. In my last year of elementary school, our school announced a recommendation for students, who lived within walking distance of school, to go home for lunch. Supposedly this was meant to give students more opportunit…
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What are some of the worst things that happened to someone in your school?
* One of my high school classmates got an infection that caused her to miss most of each of the school years we had left. Rumours indicated she had transitioned to remote learning as her condition was particularly dangerous and contagious. Over the next few years, she occasionally came back to attend…
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How did you remember the first day of school?
My first ever day of school was mostly a blur. I was already going to daycare and had made some friends who happened to be starting school for the first time too, and they and I all walked from daycare to school as a group. So I mainly stuck around that crowd the whole day. But one thing I remember m…
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Do teachers like it when students do extra work without permission?
Most of my teachers would’ve been happy if their students did extra work related to the course. Like if my mathematics teacher assigned as homework one-half the problems in one section of the textbook, and a student could prove they put in the effort to do all the problems in that section instead, t…
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Do people often miss their school days when they grow up? Why or why not?
I personally miss my school days occasionally. Having taken on a lot more home and work responsibilities as I’ve become older, sometimes I look back to a time when I would’ve had more availability to pursue the personal projects that I’m involved in now. From a different point of view, during school…
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What is, or was everyones favorite subject in school?
My single favourite school subject was always mathematics. I think I liked it because I liked problem solving using logic and hard rules, and because for every problem there was usually a single correct answer that one could reliably defend with the help of the aforementioned logic rules.…
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What are some good excuses to leave school early, other than being sick?
Personally, the only times I’ve ever left school early, for reasons other than sickness, I would’ve had some extracurricular activity like a debate tournament or science fair that happened to conflict with my regular classes. Generally, such extracurriculars would be managed by some teacher at the sc…
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What makes some kids proud to show off their parents at school, while others feel hesitant or shy?
I would’ve been hesitant or embarrassed to show off my parents at school, and I had some ideas as to what they could’ve done so that I’d be more proud to show them off. One fundamental reason, that I would’ve hesitated to show off my parents, was that I felt I hardly knew them as people. For a big pa…
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When was the last time you got detention, and why?
It was during the first half of Grade 6, when I yelled something that includred a word I wasn’t supposed to say in class. Maybe something like, “What the hell?” I hadn’t directed what I said at anyone in particular. Really, back then I tended to act out randomly, for no specific conscious reason, and…
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What was your most embarrassing punishment from your teacher?
Once during class, my teacher was asking questions and calling on specific classmates to answer, telling each classmate if they got the answer right or wrong. She called on one classmate, let’s call him Scott, who answered incorrectly. Under my breath, I said, “Stupid Scott.” My teacher stopped to as…
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Have you ever had a moment in class where you had to hold back laughter? What happened, and how did you handle it?
Warning here as this story involves a bodily function that isn’t mentioned in polite society. To fill out the text until I cover that, I’ll give some background information. I had a friend in class who would often make attempts at observational humour, but his implementation usually boiled down to to…
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Do all teachers let students sit wherever they want in class?
My elementary schools always started out with assigned seating, though occasionally for later years, our teachers took input from us as to whom we’d like to sit near, and they’d revise seating arrangements to try accommodating our requests. In high school, most of our teachers initially let us sit wh…
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What was your first day of school like? How did you feel, and how were other students and teachers?
I had been going to daycare for at least a few weeks by the time of my first day of kindergarten, and I had already made some friends who were also starting kindergarten with me, so I felt at least somewhat at ease. I honestly think other students and teachers barely registered for me, as it was mos…
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Have you ever been the "new kid" at a school? What did you experience?
This arguably happened 3 times, twice when I switched elementary schools, and once when I entered high school. 1. The 1st time, I moved to a different city in the middle of the school year. Unfortunately my first day at the new school didn’t go well, as I ended the day crying and emotional with some of…
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How do students usually react when a popular teacher or figure is abruptly replaced without any answers given?
The closest thing I can think of to this, which happened at my school, was when our music teacher left on vacation but didn’t come back to our same school, with no specific explanation ever given. Our music teacher was quite popular, having taught at our school for multiple years already and watched…
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Do students ever get revenge on abusive teachers by doing something clever after he leaves the classroom or goes home for the day (classroom pranks)?
Strictly speaking, this wasn’t a classroom prank as it happened outside our school grounds, but it was a pretty funny attempt as a revenge prank against a sometimes-abrasive teacher. I was in concert band, and one of the more abusive things our teacher did was to single out a student and say they wer…
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What makes you feel happy at school?
When I went to school, hanging out with friends and playing games with them always made me feel happy, but I remember that one of my friends would keep doing antics or getting into situations that amused me. Sometimes I looked forward to going to school just to see what would happen with him. He had…
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As a kid, did you ever skip school by lying? 😜
Thanks for the request, Liton. As a kid, I personally never skipped school by lying. However, I had a friend in high school who seemed absent due to illness a lot more often than most other students at our school. Other classmates, who had known him for longer than I did, generally believed that most…
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What is the sneakiest thing you did in school?
On at least 2 separate occasions, I had detention after school, but escaped the classroom and school around regular dismissal time without the teacher noticing. Both times, near class dismissal, I waited for the teacher to start attending to some other matter in the classroom, too busy to notice me o…
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What time does your school start and finish?
The first elementary school I went to started at 08:30 and finished at 15:45. The second and third elementary schools I went to started at 09:00 and finished at 15:30. Actually, there was a short period of time when my third school had ended at 15:00, but with a shorter lunch period and no afternoon…
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If a child passes all subjects but fails Mathematics or English, should he/she repeat the class?
My high school had different requirements for different subjects in determining whether a student could graduate by the end of the school year. Regarding mathematics and English or language arts specifically, graduation required 4 mathematics courses and 7 language arts courses. Per subject, each cou…
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Have you ever experienced a teacher suddenly being replaced with no warning? What do you think happened?
This occurred in Grade 7, when our teacher was abruptly replaced with another one day, with no detailed explanation as to why our previous teacher had left. I was a bit disappointed myself, as I thought I’d built a good rapport with the previous teacher, but I knew most of my classmates hated her. La…
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Have you ever witnessed a classroom experiment go wrong, and what was the immediate reaction from students and teachers?
This wasn’t strictly speaking an experiment gone wrong, but it’s the closest thing I can think of, and it did happen in science class. Our teacher was displaying a diagram on our classroom’s projection screen using an analog overhead projector, the kind where you put a transparent plastic sheet on it…
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Did you skip school when you where a child?
No, I never skipped school while I was a child. My parents took school extremely seriously, which included punishing me extra for every school-administered punishment or demerit against me. So if my teachers were to notice my unexplained absence, then they’d inform my parents and possibly reduce my g…
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Why do people say junior year is the hardest year of school when students choose the kind of classes they take?
This was really specific to my particular high school and program, but I participated in a quasi-gifted program at school, where I had to take certain courses in order to remain in the program. In junior year, our program had a project course that non-program students couldn’t and didn’t have to take…
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What are/were fire drills like at your school(s)?
For the schools I went to, staff would announce scheduled fire drills ahead of time, including the morning of, but usually not any later or closer to the drill itself. Our school fire alarms would activate on schedule, and we’d generally be pretty diligent in dropping what we were doing at the time,…
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Were you ever the smallest kid in your class?
I was never the smallest student by size in any of my classes, though I was often the smallest male student, because I happened to be younger than most of the other students in my grade. I was quite self-conscious about my size starting around the middle of elementary school, but that feeling faded o…
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What did you usually do after school when you were in high school?
I usually didn’t have extracurricular activities after school, and our school hired buses to take students to their home neighbourhoods, so I generally had to rush to catch the bus and couldn’t hang out at the school itself. Once I got home, I’d sometimes practise my school band instrument to get tha…
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How far did children used to walk to school?
In my experience, I never walked more than 0.5 km to school, taking me 10 minutes at my age. Whenever I lived farther than that from my school, I’d normally get a ride from my parents or take the school-hired bus to school. More often, I’d walk home from school even if it was far, usually because I’d…
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What is the most tragic announcement that was made at your high school?
It was probably when we happened to have a substitute teacher for one of our classes, and he informed us that our regular teacher’s parent-in-law had passed. We all tried to be quiet and respectful for the rest of that class period, as our substitute commented that our regular teacher’s wife was havi…
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What was the biggest scandal at your high school?
The biggest scandal at my high school, at least the biggest one that school staff were willing to admit, was when my gym teacher was absent for some weeks due to a police matter, possibly arrested. One day, our principal came to our gym class and confirmed that our regular teacher was unavailable for…
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What is the reason for some schools having combined classes instead of separate grades?
Aside from staffing-related issues mentioned in other answers, at my schools, I believe the common occurrence of multiple grades per class could also result from the staff trying to put friends together in the same class. At least one of my teachers claimed that the staff tried to keep track of frien…
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What's the most memorable interaction you've had with a school principal?
During class, I became annoyed with one or more of my classmates, and I couldn’t take it anymore so I went straight to the principal’s office to report them. The door to the office was closed, but I opened it without knocking. It just so happened that at the same time, the principal was about to leav…
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Who was the weirdest classmate that you’ve ever had?
2 classmates come to mind. 1. I wasn’t in the same class as this girl at the time, but the first time I saw her was at daycare in the same building as our elementary school. She lumbered into our daycare room and started yelling for something. A fellow daycare attendee calmly engaged her as if this was…
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