kuniga.me > NP-Incompleteness > My Favorite Subjects

My Favorite Subjects

23 Nov 2022

I’ve recently visited my parents’ place in Brazil and found an old math book from high school. From time to time I reflect on topics I enjoy today compared to those I liked or disliked growing up.

This seemed like a good opportunity to write down some of those thoughts and provide a glimpse of education in Brazil for the curious.

Disclaimer: this describes the education at the time I attended school. It’s likely this is not representative of today’s education system in Brazil at large.

Education in Brazil is divided in mainly 3 parts: ensino fundamental (fundamental instruction), ensino médio (midle instruction) and ensino superior (high instruction). The first roughly corresponds to elementary and middle school in the US, the second to high school and the third to college. We also have masters and PhD programs which are largely equivalent to the ones in the US.

Fundamental Instruction

During ensino fundamental we had mostly four subjects: Math, Portuguese, Social Sciences (Geography and History) and Science (Biology). During 5th grade I believe English (as second language) was added and some Chemistry and Physics on 8th grade (the final one at the time - I believe there are 9 grades today).

My favorite subjects by then were Math and Portuguese, and I disliked Social Sciences. Portuguese seems like an outlier given my leaning towards STEM classes, but in retrospect, what is taught in Portuguese until high school is grammar, and compared to English, Portuguese grammar is more complicated, which gets us into spending multiple years studying it. A lot of the exercises we had were about parsing sentences and classifying the tokens based on syntax.

High School

I attended a high school which was a mix of normal high school and professional school. My focus area was electronics, so we had extra classes corresponding to those one might encounter in Electrical Engineering college major but simplified for high schoolers and with bigger emphasis on practice.

This included classes like electronics, electromagnetism, circuit design, etc. We also learned low-level programming, in assembly, so technically I learned how to code in high school! But I recall it being very difficult and didn’t particularly enjoy it.

I also recall this teacher trying to teach us Calculus informally and that it didn’t make sense to me. It would only become intuitive to me in college, after I had numerical calculus and his explanations clicked after those many years.

My favorite subjects in high school were Math and Physics. From the specialized classes, I really liked this class called digital processing techniques. It involved the study of logical circuits including how to simplify them by showing the equivalence of their outputs (mostly by brute force, by writing down exhaustive truth tables), so it was largely Boolean Algebra.

College

Based on my experience with the specialized classes in high school, I learned I wouldn’t enjoy majoring in Electrical Engineering. I’m lucky in this regard, since most people have to pick a major in college without any prior exposure. I did know I enjoyed math/logic a lot but at the time I didn’t associated that with Computer Engineering/Science.

What made me go into Computer Engineering was the more mundane fact that I started playing PC games at the time and hoped I could get into game development some day.

In college I got involved with programming contests on my first year. It has had a huge impact on my life trajectory so far, and at the time it also influenced what kind of subjects I enjoyed. Not surprisingly, my favorite classes were the analysis of algorithms series and even graduate courses related to programming contests. But this came at the expense of my interest in subjects I used to like before including Math and Physics.

The subjects I recall disliking were Databases, Distributed Systems, Network, Operating Systems and Software Engineering. More on this later.

Post-College

After college I realized that when the motivation to learn something comes from myself, the learning experience is highly enjoyable. I also learned that writing about subjects I’m studying is a big motivating factor.

One interesting reversal happened: I’m now very eager to learn about subjects I disliked in college such as Databases, Distributed Systems and Operating Systems. I believe it’s mostly because I can relate to them in my work, even if tangentially.

Another reversal is that I’m now also keen on learning History. I found that these are the non-fiction books I’ve been enjoying the most in the past few years. I think a large part of it is being able to connect to other bits of history I already know. It feels like putting pieces of a giang mental jigsaw in place. I believe another big contributor is having been more exposed to museums and having travelled more.

I’ve more recently rekindled my interest in Math and Physics. There’s so much I don’t know about these subjects that it’s easier to feel the excitement of 0-to-1 learning like Topology.