Today, as always, Friday is approaching...
Our eldest daughter is a high school freshman...
Even without being told to study, she studies hard in a model student style...
She has the opposite tendency from me...
When the light is on even late at night or early morning
I slightly open the door to peek...
She sits there saying she's doing homework
But looking back at the old days, I didn't do that when I was a high school freshman...
So...
I tell my eldest daughter sometimes...
When you're a student, studying is of course important, but what's more important than that is
what you like...why you're studying at this late hour...
Finding that out for yourself is more important than test scores, I tell her...
Maybe because she takes after me...
Math seems to be a bit weak for her...
Because she's weak in it, she seems to study math harder to compensate...
My thought is this...
If you focus on a weak subject, your grades will definitely improve...
But the very fact that she's weak in that subject means she doesn't have much interest in it...
My daughter is quite good at English...
Instead of spending too much time on math
I wish she would spend more time on English, which she does well and enjoys...
There's a saying that even geniuses can't beat someone who enjoys what they do...
When you focus on what you like...
You'll feel that your own potential is enormous without even realizing it...probably...
Once you experience that...
You'll feel that your self-esteem rises incredibly...
I did poorly in math when I was in school...
It wasn't fun for me...
But...
English and Korean were almost perfect level...
Because I liked them, I studied more...
I liked pop songs
No one asked me to, but I translated them...
I tried pen pals...
It seems I didn't pay much attention to being bad at math...
Because...
What I felt myself was
I thought I had a mind that was more outstanding in languages than in mathematics...
My self-esteem was quite high...that's how I think...
Although I'm bad at math
Because I'm more outstanding than others in languages
Math...even if I couldn't do that, it wasn't a problem at all, or so I thought...
Or did I brainwash myself...
Anyway, that's how I spent my school days...
But what's funny is...
That me went to engineering school...
A person who hates math and physics went to engineering school
and studied thermodynamics and fluid mechanics and such...
What do you think it was like...?
Usually by the second semester of senior year, people almost don't attend classes...
Because they've completed most of their credits by the first semester of senior year...
I attended full classes in the second semester of senior year too...
Even then, one subject got an F...
I begged the professor and barely graduated from college...
The reason I went to engineering school was...
They said job placement was good
So I went without thinking...
Despite being terrible at math, I went to engineering school because they said job placement was good...
It seems I had no thoughts about what I liked or what I wanted to become...
So I often ask my daughter what she wants to become...
To become the person she wants to be, what kind of studying she should do
What she's doing now and things like that...
I've been drinking since high school...
Back then, I drank with an older brother and sister who were college students that I knew...
That sister met a foreigner and is now living well in Canada with children...
Later, when I became a college student, we met again...
They asked what major I went to
When I said I went to engineering, they said...
I thought you went to humanities and were lying on campus with your girlfriend's lap as a pillow
reading poetry or something...
Hearing that story...
Our department had no women...
The seniors were all men too
They gathered us on the roof to build character, made us do push-ups, and hit our butts with clubs...
Strangely though...
I didn't feel at all like I should have gone to humanities like they said...
Because without realizing it, I imagined that scene in my head...
If I were lying on campus with a girl's lap as a pillow
Since it's outdoors, it would be very noticeable to people...
From far away, girls I don't know would run over and push the girl whose lap I had my head on...
Eventually the girls would roll around on the grass fighting and pulling each other's hair...
Trying to untangle the messy hair would take more than just a day or two...
Solving thermodynamics twice a week might seem easier...
