Blogging has been one of the most enjoyable things about this lit class and the year in general. While it’s kind of sad that this is the final one, it also represents the fact that we’ll be moving on in our lives and academic journeys. With that, here’s my answers to a few of the prompts. 

 

What was your favorite blog to write and why? Which blog were you most proud of?

I think my favorite blog to write about this semester was the one about the time I went to Bulgaria for a competition. When I was there, I was mostly focused on the competition and didn’t have much time to soak in the atmosphere, but writing the blog helped me reflect on my time there and how going to different places and hearing different voices can expose us to new perspectives and ways of thinking of the world, which was incidentally one of the main focuses of the course. It was really picturesque over there but I didn’t take a lot of pictures while I was there, which is something I’m kind of sad about in hindsight. The blog I’m most proud of was the difficulty poem essay. I spent a lot of time on it trying to use the techniques in class to analyze the poem, and it was an eye-opener to me because it was the first time in high school that I tried to analyze poetry.

What would you say about your voices novel to a senior next year?

I actually really liked my Voices novel, Interior Chinatown. I feel that the main character is relatable because he’s trying his best to achieve his dreams but faces very human struggles and we can see a three-dimensional view of him. The book is written like a screenplay, which makes it confusing at first, but once you get used to it it becomes a metaphor of its own, showing how we all have roles to play in real life as well.

 

What are the most significant things you learned during your Voices project?

I think that one of the most important things I learned during the voices project was to embrace using sources that aren’t just papers or articles. We were encouraged to use documentaries, TED talks, art, poetry, or any form of communication to back up our viewpoints and enhance our understanding. I think that this not only got me more used to using and citing these types of sources, but it also got me to understand more about the subject. I was also impressed by the variety of sources that were in other presentations; for example I remember one presentation that used an AI generated image, and I thought it was powerful because it’s a reflection of the collective bias of the whole internet that the AI shows us. 

 

What are the most important things you learned about yourself, your community, and your world during your time at NNHS?

The most important thing that I learned about my community during my time at NNHS is the amount of adults who truly care here. I know that not all of us are the best students when it comes to meeting deadlines and putting our best effort into doing things, so I feel a little guilty in knowing that many of the teachers here are willing to help at all times and put effort into helping us out with our schoolwork and rec letters. I think that another positive thing about the community is that students encourage each other to succeed. I know that in other schools, students try to put each other down in orde to get a higher class rank, but the atmosphere here is thankfully not that toxic because we don’t have class rank. Additionally, I think that there is positive peer pressure, at least in honors classes, to keep chasing different opportunities like clubs, research, internships, etc. 

 

What advice would I give to future NNHS Seniors?

I would tell them to try to find a balance between taking a lot of hard classes second semester and proving to colleges that you have course rigor. I feel that there are many seniors right now whose brains are in full senioritis mode but still are overburdened with finals and APs when they just want to give up. While I understand that many would prefer an AP class senior year in order to get college credit, I would recommend taking easier classes and less hard APs. I would also advise them to use the time not spent on school work due to senioritis to try to connect with family and explore their interests before going away. In addition one of the main things that helped me visualize my senior year was realizing that in only 9 months, all of high school will be over, which not only helped me push through stressful times, but also made me want to prioritize the time I have. 

In my opinion, one of the coolest things about Indian languages is the diverse and beautiful writing systems that they have. One of the main things I hear about Indian writing systems is that they look confusing. For example, look at this word: ജനിച്ചിട്ടുള്ളവരാണ്‌. Besides the fact that it is long, all of its characters have so many twists and turns that it’s hard to keep track, making people feel confused. In many cases, a writing system defines the identity of the language. In fact, my grandmother was once confused upon seeing a English-Spanish-Polish street sign because she thought it was weird for three different languages to be written with the same alphabet. It’s for this reason that the writing systems all look different; different languages are pressured to diversify their writing in order to stand out. However, despite the fact that the scripts look different, they all (with the exception of Arabic-based writing systems like Urdu) fundamentally operate on the same system. I’ll be explaining this system and how it applies to a few languages to show you a glimpse of how to break them down in case you’ve ever wanted to read other people’s tattoos or something.

 

To explain the overarching system, our example word will be adbhuta, which is the Sanskrit word for miracle. The first step is to separate the word after every vowel. So we would divide it and say a|dbhu|ta. Then, if the part consists of a vowel only, then we find the letter for that vowel. So, for ‘a,’ the Devanagari (the script used for Hindi) letter is अ, so we put that there, making our word अdbhu|ta. Otherwise, we find the consonant letter and put a vowel modification. For example, the last sequence ‘t’ in Devanagari is त. ‘A’ as a vowel modification is marked by doing nothing, so ‘ta’ is त, making our word अdbhuत. For the middle sequence, we do the same thing. The letter for dbh is द्भ and ‘u’ is made by putting a hook below, so we get द्भु. The only thing is that complex consonants like dbh is made by combining the simple consonants द ’d’ and भ ‘bh’ in a process that is different for every language. The full word in Devanagari is अद्भुत, split like अ-द्भु-त, and here’s what it looks like in other scripts – Bengali: অ-দ্ভু-ত​, Gujarati: અ-દ્ભુ-ત, Malayalam: അ-ദ്ഭു-ത, Telugu: అ-ద్భు-త, Tamil: அ-த்பு-த. Knowing the system, we can tackle learning individual scripts by learning four main characteristics about them: the independent vowel and simple consonant letters, vowel modification, the formation of double and triple consonants, and going from spelling to pronunciation. 

 

The first characteristic is the independent vowel and simple consonant signs. There’s not a whole lot to say about this because it’s just like memorizing the alphabet, but I wanted to point a few things out about how the letters are arranged. The first thing is that this shows the alphabetical order of the language.  So if you’re looking for a word in a dictionary or are alphabetizing something, you need to know this order. In addition, the consonants from ‘ka’ to ‘ma’ are organized in a 5×5 chart, where the rows show the place in the mouth where the sound is pronounced, and the columns show the method with which it’s pronounced, which can be helpful for new learners.

 

 

The next characteristic is vowel marking. For the most part in Indian languages, this is pretty straightforward. For example, in Devanagari, the way to mark the vowel ‘i’ on a consonant is to make a line going over the top and down on the left side, like so: प > पि. However, in some languages, namely Telugu and Kannada, the combinations get more complicated. For example, adding ‘i’ to the following letters క, చ, గ, and య, we get కి, చి, గి, and యి, which are all created in a different way. While for Telugu, you might have to learn each combination separately, for other languages like Bengali there are only a few irregulars like g > gu is গ > গু. Another thing is that adding ‘a’ does nothing to the letter, i.e it is the default. To have no vowel on a letter actually requires its own special modification, like in the name Dee-ra-j, where the j has to take the vowel killer marker. 

 

The third characteristic is creating consonant clusters. There are three main methods. The first one, used by Tamil, is not combining consonants, but just putting the vowel killer on the first one and putting the vowel on the next consonant, i.e dbhu > dwithkiller+bhu > த்+பு. The second method, used by Telugu, Javanese, and Khmer, is made by putting the vowel on the first consonant, and having any following consonants change slightly and go under the first. So dbhu would be ‘d’ ద + ‘u’ + ‘bh’ భ underneath > ద్భు. The third method, used by Devanagari and most other scripts is to just mash both consonants together and put the vowel on that, so dbhu = d द + bh भ + u = द्भु. Usually, it’s easy to tell which two consonants are mashed together by knowing only a few basic rules, but sometimes there are irregulars; here are the irregulars in Devanagari : क्त kt, क्ष ksh, ज्ञ jn, त्त tt, त्र tr, द्द dd, द्म dm, and द्य dy. 

 

The final characteristic is going from spelling to pronunciation. Sometimes, things aren’t pronounced exactly as their spelled, and each language has its own quirks, so it’s important to deeply study whatever language you’re trying to learn, but here I’ll go over a major quirk: In most North Indian languages, the sound ‘a’ is deleted if at the end of the word or surrounded by consonants which are in turn surrounded by vowels. 

 

There’s alot I didn’t cover in this post, because it’s impossible to talk about every quirk of every language in great detail, but I hope that I made the process of learning these writing systems more accessible to people who may have wanted to learn but found them too hard at first and to those looking to learn for the first time.  

Last summer, I went to Bulgaria for a competition. While I was there, I reflected a lot on the similarities and differences between Bulgaria and the US. Being my first time in Europe, I was unsure of what to expect. In this blog, I want to just show a few of my observations about how it was to be there from a foreigner perspective, both the good and bad.

The first thing that I noticed was the natural surroundings of Bulgaria. The part of the country that I was in is fully mountainous, a stark contrast to what I saw in the Midwest. However, besides that, a lot of the trees, plants, and road signs were pretty similar, so when we were going from place to place, I forgot that I was in a foreign country because the surroundings were pretty much what you would see driving through any national park. Except for going to Las Vegas once as a little kid, I had never been any mountainous area, so this was my first time seeing mountains. So on the three-hour drive from the airport to the competition venue, my eyes were glued to the window looking at the beauty of the all of the mountain ranges.

The place I was at is a ski town, so it was probably busy in the winter, however in the summer, most of the people were locals, and it looked like any small town. The main thing I noticed was how close eveything is. Right outside of my hotel was a neighborhood, a community park and the main shopping area, making going anywhere you wanted in the town pretty easy. By contrast, in suburbia, you have to go through rows of neighborhoods to get to places. The person who felt this the most was my grandmother who was with me. She often feels that America is suffocating because you can’t walk to places like how she did in India, but Bulgaria provided a more relaxing atmosphere and she wants to live there someday. One of the biggest things for me about this atmosphere is that when I hear the word “small town,” I generally think of the decay and decline in the small towns I’ve been to like my stepdad’s grandparents’ hometown, but this town was the opposite, with the main street vibrant and buildings new. I realized that I had to throw away the stereotype I had before about decay and realize that not all small towns are like that, especially this one because it brings in tourism revenue every year.

You can’t talk about a place without talking about the food. I thought that the food was alright, not excellent, but definitely not bad. The organizers emphasized that we try some Bulgarian food while we were there. A lot of the meat in the traditional dishes was excellent, but I felt that the vegetables were ordinary. For example, I remember eating shopska salata, a salad with Bulgarian cheese grated on top. I’m not a huge cheese person, so I thought that the cheese just ruined the veggies, which were already pretty much what you would get if you cut up vegetables at your house, but if you’re into cheese, then I guess that it might be good. However, what I thought was a crime was the rice. I don’t think rice is native to Bulgaria, so this might not be a native dish, but this was in both the hotel and one time the organizers ordered catering. I woke up the first morning and headed to the dining area of the hotel, where I was excited when I saw rice, but when I dug into it, I realized it was oily. Me and most of the participants from Asian countries expressed nothing short of utter disgust when the oil rice, and I thought that I was going to get clogged arteries before the competition started. Despite this, I still think that Bulgarian food in general was pretty good, and the fact that my food was fully paid for was good enough in my opinion that I shouldn’t be complaining. Reading on traditional Bulgarian food while writing this blog, I feel that I missed out on many excellent dishes so I definitely want to go back if I can and try more. One thing I wanted to add is that people don’t really know or care if something is completely vegetarian or not, so if you are vegetarian, then you should probably do what one of the Indian participants did and bring seven days worth of instant upma.

Finally, the people of Bulgaria were some of the nicest and most adaptable people I’ve met. An example is that the place where the competition was had no AC, and this was during the heat wave in Europe last summer. However, the organizers were able to get fans in every room, and my proctor made sure I was comfortable before the test, which I found nice. The only thing that you might need to watch out for is that dark-skinned people sometimes receive racism from locals. While I didn’t experience this, one of my friends did, so it’s important to be cautious and travel in groups while you’re there. Regardless, all of the Bulgarian people that I met were extremely polite and accommodating.

 

Out of all the places that I’ve been to, Bulgaria is the place that is most like a “window,” to me, allowing me to see into other cultures, and I thought it was great that I had the opportunity to go around and see what it’s like. Between good skiing in the winter and good hiking in the summer, if you’re looking for a nice place international to travel that’s relatively cheap, Bulgaria would be a good place to check out.

The poem “As Freedom is a Breakfast Food” by E.E Cummings was at first confusing, however, it wasn’t confusing for the same reasons that some of his other poems were. While there are no awkward line breaks or confusing misspellings, what tripped me was the nonsensical nature of the similies and metaphors. Take for example, “as freedom is a breakfastfood.” (1). We can start to try to understand this by thinking of the qualities of breakfast foods: filling and energizing. Perhaps we can say that freedom is energizing, though keeping in mind that it’s perplexing why Cummings would use the word breakfastfood to describe it, but then we get to the following lines which have different similies and metaphors of their own, unconnected to what came before. In trying to figure those out, I completely forget about the breakfastfood simile. Many of these lines seem to just be contradictions or negations of what people usually say, such as “and every finger is a toe” (10) and “and robins never welcome spring” (16). 

 

The punctuation and syntax also confused me at first. There is no capitalization or punctuation except for some hyphens. Without knowing where the sentences or phrases begin or end, it made it much harder to understand the syntax, such as “molehills are from mountains made.” When skimming, we first read, “mountains made from a molehill” as is the common saying, but when undoing the passive voice, we realize that the line says “molehill made from mountains,” which goes back to the first confusion of the similies not making sense as this is the complete opposite of what people normally say. Besides the syntax, some of the words also are slightly off, like “talentgang,” which makes sense as “a group of talented people” but isn’t a word that we use. 

 

I started to try to understand these things by going away from analyzing line by line to trying to see the structure of the poem as a whole and the repeating elements. The poem has 4 stanzas of 7 lines each. While there is no comprehensive rhyming scheme, it seems that the last sound of the odd and even syllables in a given stanza rhyme with each other. This makes some of the word choice make since, like using “dong” in line 18 instead of “dawn” to match with spring and long, then changing dinkster to dingster to match with that. In the first three stanzas, the lines start with conjunctions such as “as”, “or,” “and”, or “nor”. The exception to this rule is in every stanza, the line “- long enough and just so long.” This line comes at the 4th line of 1st stanza, 5th of 2nd stanza, and 6th of third stanza, making it seem that it follows a pattern of going one line down per stanza. I made sure to circle these sentences to isolate them as they seem to point to a common theme. 

 

The fourth stanza doesn’t follow this pattern at all, starting with any type of word. The line that has a hyphen is not the 7th line, deviating from the pattern of the previous stanzas, but is in the middle and says, “time is a tree (this life one leaf) (26)”. However, the 7th line says, “just so long and long enough,” inverting the line of the previous three stanzas. 

 

I tried to unpack this poem by looking at the last stanza, seeing it as a conclusion separate from the other three stanzas, and by trying to understand the meaning of “long enough and just so long.” I realized that the last three lines made some sense. “time is a tree (this life one leaf) but love is the sky and I am for you just so long and long enough.” (26-28). I interpreted these lines as saying that the speaker’s love is unlimited and the life they have, though limited (a leaf), is enough to enjoy that love (long enough). One extra thing I noticed in these few lines is the word “but” in line 27. To me, it served to distinguish the rest of the poem, which makes no logical sense, from the last two lines, which are genuine. In fact, we can see capitalization in the word “I” in this sentence, further showing a subtle hint to a change to normalcy

 

Viewing the poem as a love poem and all of the stanzas except the last few as ungenuine brought a different light to the poem because instead of trying to derive meaning from the first three stanzas of the poem, we can instead view them as a reflection of our raw emotions, which often defies reason, carrying over to no logic in those stanzas and order, carrying over to no punctuation in the entire poem, but still manage to have a rhythm to them just like how the poem vaguely rhymes.

 

Recently, I’ve been thinking about naming trends in India, because a lot of my relatives are starting to have kids, and they’re putting a lot of mental effort into what their kids should be named, from asking relatives to looking at horoscopes and fighting back and forth about names to deciding which celebrity names they should take. So I wanted to explain and give my opinion on a few of the naming trends in India at the moment. I’ll only focus on Hindu names because other religions have their own naming customs and trends.

The first major trend is the replacement of regional names with Hindi or north-influenced names. My own name is the result of this. Deeraj is the Hindi/Gujarati version of the Sanskrit word “dhirya,” which means firm or brave. I think that the reason I was named that provides insight into why these names are becoming more popular. I was named after Deerajlal Ambani, one of the biggest businessmen of all time in India, whose scandal-free career my grandmother thought highly of. As people name their kids after celebrities from all over India, the regional identity of first names begins to disappear. I don’t think this is a huge problem because there’s nothing wrong with giving a kid the name of a person you admire, but what I’m not a huge fan of is the stigmatization of regional names. For example, a common suffix of names in the Andhra Pradesh and Telangana states is ayya, also spelled like aiah. We can add it to a word like Veer “hero” to make Veerayya. In the past, adding this was common; many important figures in the history of these two states had this suffix, like the first poet Nannayya, but nowadays it is considered old-fashioned or even backwards to have a name like that. 

 

One of the weirdest trends in my opinion is where names themselves don’t come in and out of fashion like in America, but the starting letter does. For example, out of my Dad’s male cousins, their names all start with P. However, nowadays names starting with A or S are more common. Among the top 100 names in India today, 25 start with A. This isn’t a cultural thing either, where a generation will all have names starting with the same letter. Furthermore, this trend seems to have started pretty recently, after name registries were done in English because usually one English letter will correspond to different letters in Indian languages. I think that this trend is okay, because even within a single starting letter there are many different possibilities for unique and thoughtful names. It’s just weird to me whenever I go to some event and all of the other kids my age are named Atharv, Aryan, Advaith, Ananth, and so on. Personally, my favorite letters for Indian Hindu names start with N like Narasimha, or Narayana, so I hope that they become popular in the future. 

 

The third trend is similar to something in the US, giving your kid a regular name but slightly modified, like spelling Kylie like Kylee or Kyleigh. Instead of adding -eigh, I think that the most common modification is -ansh for guys and -anshi for girls. This word normally means piece or part, but it has other meanings like strength, vigor, or substance. You can pretty much take any name and add -ansh to it, for example, Shrey “excellent” plus ansh is Shreyansh. I don’t think that this trend is that bad either, but it’s just really unoriginal. 

The fourth and final trend is the general trend of shortening names. All across India, many names used to be longer, such as Robindronath in Robindronath Tagore, one of the most famous historical Bengali poets and artists, but now people tend to prefer one or two-syllable names. Even my dad was first named Lakshmi Narasimha Praveen Kumar before my grandma thought it was too ridiculous and put just Praveen on the birth certificate. The thing is that even if people have long names, they tend to get shortened down anyways, like how Robindronath Tagore was called Rabi in his youth. However, I think that having a long name is badass and I wish my parents gave me one. 

There’s plenty more trends when it comes to names in India, but these are the ones I thought of first. I don’t really dislike any of them, but I find it interesting that such a personal and monumental decision such as naming has its own trends, as if it’s still controlled by others. I’m kind of curious to see what naming trends will be in India or the US in 10-20 years as Gen Z becomes parents and has its own kids.

Even through all of the Fridays when I stayed up late writing them after procrastinating during the week, writing these blogs has been one of the most enjoyable things I’ve done in an English class. I learned a lot by reading others’ blogs and seeing an interest or side of them that I hadn’t seen before. I truly believe that the lit blog is one of the things that made this semester enjoyable.

 

Throughout the semester, my favorite blog to write was the “Animal Intelligence” blog. I wrote about the intellectual advantages that animals have over humans, especially in emotional intelligence, along with showcasing different animals’ abilities with communication and problem-solving. What I liked the most about it was being able to reflect on humanity in general. When I was younger, I heard a lot of things that separate humans from animals — the ability to believe in God, the ability to use thumbs, having to worry about taxes, but foremost intelligence. But if animals could attain high levels of intelligence, then what really separates humans from animals on a level other than just being a different species? Are humans special? Through the post, I also got to reflect on the animals in my life. My dog, whose picture I put in the blog post, had been dealing with arthritis for two years at that point (I think her arthritis medicine was visible in the picture) and finally passed away almost a week after I wrote the post. Writing the post got me to think about how much value pets, with their emotional intelligence, add to our lives, and now that my dog has passed away. Furthermore, I was able to consider questions about learning. The average bonobo knows zero words, yet Kanzi the bonobo learned over three thousand. He shows that we can learn a lot if we put our minds to a particular subject. However, I admit that I didn’t research that blog post well, and widely overestimated animals’ intelligence. For example, as Krishna told me later, an octopus, who I pointed out as having exceptional problem-solving abilities, can solve a maze, but can it create one? Regardless, this blog made me think more about many existential questions and prompted me to look further into animals even after submitting the post, even though I’d never been a huge animal person before.

By reading other people’s blogs, I feel that I learned how to make top five lists about everything. Many of the blogs showcased a person’s favorite five of something. While I thought these were repetitive to see over and over again, I think that these types of posts were some of the most insightful posts of the whole class. They showed insight into the writer’s personality and interests, and after reading, I could go buy the products or watch the movie that they said was good, knowing that it would be high-quality. Furthermore, writing a good top-five list takes skill in not only having a decent understanding of what you’re talking about but also persuasion. People make a decent amount of money sidehustling by submitting top ten lists to different websites, so having that skill is not entirely invaluable.

I think that the most important lesson that I’ll take away from this semester is to check my work. This semester, there have been frequent times when a lapse in concentration caused me to lose points and sleep. From not having a defensible interpretation on a timed writing, to forgetting to put “approximately normal” instead of “normal” in Stats, to reading one line of code wrong in AP Comp Sci. This obviously isn’t just a problem for me this semester, as it has been a recurring theme throughout my entire academic career. Since first grade, I’ve gotten much better at double checking and eliminating silly mistakes, but I want to eliminate the stress over them once and for all second semester before I go to college. Truthfully, I will probably not be successful in being perfectly mistake free at any point in my life, but at least striving towards that goal will put me in a much better spot in life than if I let all my mistakes slide. 

I had heard about the blogs before from seniors of years past, so I was looking forward to it a little bit, but writing them was more fun than I thought it would be at first. I learned a lot about my classmates that I wouldn’t have known otherwise, and hope to continue blogging second semester.

In the early 1900s, there was a horse named Clever Hans, who was famed for being able to solve arithmetic problems by stomping his hoof the same number of times as the answer to a math problem on a board that his handler wrote. However, what actually happened is that the owner would involuntarily relax a little when Hans reached the answer, and Hans took that cue to stop. Most people of the time thought that this was all a scam because the horse couldn’t really do math. But while the horse couldn’t do math, he could notice the minute differences in his handler’s face, which is arguably more impressive. He just changed the game to get the same desired result. Can we really say that Hans was unintelligent?

Often when people are asked what separates humans and animals, they say intelligence. After all, how is a jellyfish supposed to be a Mensa member? But at the same time, like Hans, animals have many strong suits that circumvent our common measures of intelligence like IQ tests. To see whether humans are actually at the top, I’ll see how humans compare to animals in three main fields: communication, emotional intelligence, and problem solving ability. Obviously, not all animals have the same intelligence, so for each category, I’ll compare the best animal examples with the average human.

 

When it comes to communication, it’s pretty safe to say that humans take the cake. The main thing that humans have over animals is called displacement, where beings can talk about events that are not spatially or temporally present. This includes talking hypotheticals, recounting events from a long time ago, or expressing wishes for the long future. These are important for all human innovations because they allow us to create goals, debate, extrapolate from previous experiences, and collaborate, letting us use and grow our intelligence. Although animals like ants can do incredible things under collaboration, their scope of communication is ultimately confined to the recent past and basic things like food and appropriate building sites, which works for them, but doesn’t demonstrate advanced capabilities like that of a human. Probably the best evidence that human levels of communication aren’t unique to humans is the communication between the two bonobos Kanzi and Panbanisha. Both bonobos were raised by humans from an early age, and were spoken to in English, with both of them being taught Yerkish, a form of communication made by pressing keys on a keyboard. They actually reached a point where they could understand roughly 3000 English words and communicate with each other complexly in Yerkish. To some, it seemed that the only thing separating them from a human child is not having a throat that can produce all of the sounds of spoken languages. 

Many animals don’t have emotions on a complex level, but ones that do seem to have them can sense emotions at a higher level than humans. Clever Hans is a prime example. He sensed the involuntary relaxation of the handler, which most humans probably couldn’t do. Similarly, the reason that dogs are common support animals is because they can sense human emotions and act in a way that comforts them. Furthermore, animals have an ability to control their emotions, a clear sign of emotional intelligence. An example is my own dog, who sometimes clearly wants to eat human food, but restrains herself from biting my hand to eat it because she knows it’s wrong to bite people.

Overall, humans are pretty good at problem-solving. Even opening a door might be impossible for some species, so the fact that humans can get through each day with different challenges and difficult solutions is comparatively impressive. However, one class of species rivals humans: cephalopods. Including octopi and squids, octopi show incredible situational awareness, generally gathering information with their eight tentacles before processing that information to solve a problem. Ever since I saw the Mark Rober video with an octopus seamlessly going through a tough maze as if it was casually strolling through, I realized that they could probably be more intelligent than humans but just didn’t have the chance to create a complex civilization.

Seeing the above comparisons, humans are more intelligent than animals in many areas. However, animals can be superior to humans, and shouldn’t be underestimated. Regardless of species, we’re all trying to survive, and all species have done their best to find areas to excel in. Just as we can’t judge a human by its ability to fend off predators, we can’t judge a porcupine based on its ability to do complex tasks, as long as both species live long enough to create a second generation. Furthermore, there is a heavy human bias to any measure of animal intelligence, as we are basing them off of the ways humans express intelligence. I just think that it’s fascinating how often beings that we regard as “simple” can understand us better than we understand ourselves. 

 

Last week in stats, we took our test about sampling and experimental design. One of the main ideas of that unit that we had to drill in is that experiments have randomly assigned treatments and controls that the experimenters perform on subjects, and only experiments can determine causation instead of just correlation. 

 

When I got home after that test, my grandmother told me, “ I saw this thing on the TV9 Drushyam YouTube channel where if you do extreme penance, you can be in cold weather without any winter gear. Look at this guy.” And I saw a sage who was wearing only a robe just walking around in the middle of the Himalayas during winter. Needless to say, I was amazed, but because stats was still in my brain, I thought to myself, “This isn’t even a proper observational study, let alone an experiment. There’s no way of telling whether this is even true, let alone whether it works for others.” Both my grandmother and I knew this was fake and laughed it off when I said that I would do penance and play with my dog outside in only a robe during winter to practice becoming this guy. In the week since I’ve been thinking a little about not only our gullibility but also how we believe that what works for others works for us. 

I was pretty gullible as a kid. When I was 8 or so, some of my friends would gang up on me by telling me a story at lunch and adding more details until I believed it. Most people are smarter than eight-year-old me and don’t believe obvious things like the guy who was walking around in the Himalayas, but they might believe a simple statistic like “80% of students haven’t touched a book outside of class.” Even though we don’t know whether it is right or not, we still believe things because we’re not really paying attention. Besides, these little numbers and facts usually don’t matter in our lives. However, they still make an impact. During the early college app season, I didn’t apply to some schools because I thought that their acceptance rates were lower than they actually were, just because I heard a number from a friend who heard it from a parent’s cousin without actually checking for myself. Some base their life philosophies on things that are exaggerated or untrue; for example, my relatives who think the world is scarier than it actually is just because of seeing news headlines all day. Of course, we shouldn’t lose trust in others just for the sake of not being gullible, however, I think that whenever we’re doing something and a relevant fact pops up in our heads, like the acceptance rate numbers, we should try to think of where we heard that fact, or whether its true or not. I’ve been trying this over the past week and realized the countless little things I believed without real evidence. 

 

Another thing that we do a lot that I was thinking about is copying others and expecting the same result for us. An example is trying to stay up all night after the one kid who got an A on the test also stayed up all night studying. Even assuming that that kid is telling the truth, going back to the stats stuff, its impossible to be certain that something will work without designing an experiment with controls and randomization. There could be confounding variables such as having background knowledge or using better resources. I’m not saying that we need experiments for everything because you can’t just make people participate in an experiment when they have other things going on in their lives, or that we shouldn’t look to others for inspiration, but I think that we shouldn’t beat ourselves up if we did what everyone successful did and didn’t succeed. At the end of the day, 90% of success is luck*, and it’s physically and mentally unhealthy to blindly follow others all the time. If I followed that sage’s penance to be able to be coldproof, I would probably just get severe hypothermia before achieving anything.

 

A lot of the time, I just believe things or follow others because there’s too many things to worry about to stress about each of them. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, but I think it’s important to know where my priorities are and double check those areas without just copying others.

*Also, 90% of statistics are made up.

 

After reading everyone’s literary narratives from a while ago, I started thinking a lot about children’s books. These books are arguably the most important books of them all because they are the first to teach children not only how to sound words out and put them together, but also how to think and how to imagine. So today, I wanted to explore what I think makes a children’s book good and list two of my favorite children’s books. Note that by children’s books, I mean books for preschoolers or kindergarteners, not for older elementary schoolers.

From my observations remembering my favorite children’s books, I think that there are four main qualities that make a kids’ book good.

• A complete yet interesting plot: By complete, I mean that the story has a beginning and an end. Speaking from experience, no kid wants to see a cliffhanger or would understand the significance of one; furthermore, it is hard to put an easy-to-understand message in the story if there is no resolution. 
• A good lesson/moral: Little kids are learning new things every day, and they are learning how to act. That’s where a good moral which teaches children to be nice, kind, resilient, or any other positive quality comes in to help kids navigate their lives. 
• An appropriate vocabulary: Ideally, the child reading should know most of the words, otherwise, they would be too confused to enjoy the book, however, some of the words could be more complicated to increase the reader’s vocabulary. 
• Good pictures: Most children’s books are picture books, so bad pictures just throw the whole book off. On the contrary, I can still imagine the caterpillar in The Hungry Caterpillar solely because I remember the unique drawings.
  To show some examples of these qualities in action, here are children’s books that not only I think fit these qualities, but were also my favorite in kindergarten.

 

Goodnight Moon
This is one of the first books I remember reading. For a brief recap, Goodnight Moon is a picture book where night falls and we have to say goodnight to all of the objects in the house and in the sky before finally going to bed. The plot is kind of nonexistent in the sense that there is no real action, but it does have a clear end, which is when we go to sleep.  The moral, while not super explicit, is also simple, being that we should be cognizant of everything in our surroundings and that we should say farewells to everyone before sleeping or leaving. The vocabulary is a little too basic because there are no words that a little kid wouldn’t know, but maybe that makes it a better bedtime story, where kids aren’t awake enough to learn new words. The illustrations, on the other hand, are very good.  On some of the pages, there’s a large amount of detail showing the objects being said good night too, contrasting with other pages which are just white, where it says, “Good night Nobody.” I think that the illustrations convey the lighthearted and almost sarcastic feel of the book. Overall, I think that this is a nice nighttime read, not too simple, but not too complicated.

The Little Engine That Could
The Little Engine That Could is a story where although the other engines thought they couldn’t pull a heavy train car over a hill, one engine stood up to the task and said to itself, “I think I can” over and over again until it pulled the car over the hill. I like the story. It’s easy for children to understand that someone succeeded in an impossible task through determination alone. And that lesson is very powerful, not only for children but arguably for teens and adults too. So powerful in fact, that according to my mom, after I read this book, I said “I think I can” and backflipped off of a couch unsuccessfully. The vocabulary is a little more varied than Goodnight Moon, but still appropriate for kids. As for the illustrations, they do their job of putting the child in the setting, but something about it didn’t strike me the same as Goodnight Moon. They still convey the perseverance of the train, which is ultimately the most important part of the book.

While I think that there are many more qualities that make good children’s books, I think that these are the most important because when I try to remember children’s books, these aspects stick the most. Regardless of how they’re analyzed, children’s books are a staple of cultures all over the world and many of our fondest memories. There are many great authors and illustrators, including Naperville North’s own Tom Champion, who brighten up the world every day by writing children’s books, and I hope that these books and their lessons keep being a part of our childhoods.

I was talking to my grandmother the other day, and she said something strange to me. “Most of the languages of India are going to disappear. They have no value in the present day.” 

 

At first, my dad and I thought that this assertion was over-dramatic and frankly a little dumb. To illustrate what we were thinking, let’s take my grandmother’s own native language, Telugu. It is spoken by over 94 million people in the two Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, bigger than the populations of countries like the UK and Germany, and even more people worldwide. Every year, countless books, movies, and TV shows are made in it, and it is the dominant language of news and politics. Telugu pervades everyday life in those two states, being a common home and street language. Most people in those two states speak Telugu only, with no knowledge of English or other languages. It’s abundantly clear that Telugu does have value. With such a robust foundation as this, my dad and I thought, how could Telugu disappear?

To answer that question, first, we have to consider what it means for a language to die and how it dies. 

A language becomes extinct when there is no one left who can speak it fluently. We can rephrase that as a language dies when speakers don’t pass on the language to the next generation. If native speakers decide not to pass on the language to their kids, the language will die with them. This is not like when people say Latin is a dead language because Latin just slowly morphed into French, Italian, Spanish, etc. through the regular processes of language change. This is when the speakers of a language decide to not speak the language to their children. 

However, not passing on one’s language isn’t very natural. For example, most native English speakers raising kids in America wouldn’t even think twice but to speak English to their child. Similarly, it’s everyone’s instinct to speak with their child in their native language. This means that just like physics, where inertia is broken by an outside force, languages die due to an outside force as well. 

While sometimes, outside forces could be dramatic, such as genocide or natural disaster, most deaths occur gradually. An example is Irish. Looking at Irish, many smaller forces in the 18th and 19th centuries added together over the years to create the situation today, where Irish is classified as Definitely Endangered. A few among them are the British administration favoring English over Irish, the Catholic Church favoring English over Irish, and mass migrations due to the Potato Famine. Over a few hundred years, Irish speakers started learning English, maintaining bilingualism for a few generations and then switched to English only. Only around 100,000 native speakers are left, all of them bilingual.

Going back to Telugu, it doesn’t seem like any of the above factors apply. No one on the government or religious level is discouraging Telugu. Maybe one could assert that there are high numbers of Telugus going overseas (people say that Telugus have four states, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, New Jersey, and Texas), but it is not a whole demographic upheaval like in Ireland. So, it seems that Telugu will survive forever … right?

While the coast seems clear for the Telugu language, there is one pervasive force, one that affects not only Telugu but all languages in India: education and job opportunities. In India, English is used at the professional level for the most sought-after and high-prestige fields: engineering, medicine, and government. So English is necessary in India for socio-economic advancement. This dynamic puts English in a prestige position, where English is the language of the educated and high class, and local languages are of the uneducated and low class.

This emphasis on English trickles down to childhood, influencing parental decisions regarding education. Many parents opt for English-medium schools (where teaching, exams, and textbooks are all in English), believing it provides their children with the best understanding of the language. In fact, my own grandmother, who is worrying so much about local languages, put my dad into an English-medium school. However, these schools often ban the use of local languages, leading to a decline in proficiency and literacy in those languages. This perpetuates a negative feedback loop, where people prioritize learning English to appear educated, further eroding proficiency in local languages, and making local languages seem unsophisticated, perpetuating the cycle.

This is precisely what my grandmother was alluding to when she mentioned that Indian languages have value. If this cycle persists, it’s possible that, over the course of several centuries, speakers of Telugu, and many others worldwide, will switch to English and other dominant languages, with the original languages relegated to fossils preserved in old books and movies.

Such a fate seems really grim because every language has something unique to it worth preserving. Imagine if all of the books that we read as kids in our literacy narratives became unreadable. Even if a translation was there, no one could capture the worth of trying new foods as Dr. Seuss does in Green Eggs and Ham. However, just as it takes a force to move languages on the path to extinction, it just takes a small counter-force to preserve every story and every language for years to come.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rplwgN6Xcc (Sonam Wangchuk’s ideas on English Medium)
https://udaras.ie/en/our-language-the-gaeltacht/history-of-the-irish-language/