A Surge of Emotions

As the final week at VSA is progressing I’ve realized how unprepared I am for the experience to end. Yesterday and today were the final two days of teaching presentations, which was a great relief but also signified that we’re running out of class days. We completed a rather simple puzzler that dealt with trying to figure out who had shaken hands with a number of people. It seemed like there wasn’t enough information to find out how many hands the main person had shaken but in the end, we had all we needed. To my surprise though, even Jon and Ming didn’t get the answer right away, which they usually do.

After lunch, we got into nonclassical logics. I think logic has been one of the more straight forward and interesting topics to me so far, despite the “lack” of real life applications to the concept. We went over three-value logic, which is logic that not only has false and true values but also “less” false values. Then, we learned about logic with an infinite number of true values. It’s all very vague in words but seeing truth tables and practicing the notation makes it easy to understand.

The Hattie B's sign

Yesterday was also the first day without an arête class. I had intentions of going to the gym above Commons during that free time, but that ended up not happening. We then had dinner at the usual time, which I should’ve skipped since my friends and I were planning to go to Hattie B’s anyway. Unfortunately, I couldn’t resist grabbing some cannoli. If there’s anything the Commons dining always provides it is good desserts.

Hattie B’s wasn’t as life changing as I was hoping for it to be but it was still a great ending to the second to last SOFT night.

Class today started out with Dawson’s favorite or 2^nd favorite math problem. We were given a scenario in which there were 100 people boarding an airplane. The first person dropped their boarding pass so they were going to pick a seat at random, thus affecting the way the rest of the people took their seats. After acting out 17 scenarios with the class, we concluded that there was a 50% chance the last person boarding the plane would take their assigned seat. There was some very exciting math behind that problem.

A beautiful Nashville sky

We ended class with some more frustrating but exciting to solve puzzles about stacks of gold coins containing a fake, or several, fake coins. The last question was left unanswered but I’ll find some time to try to solve it outside of class.

What I was looking forward to all day was Proctor Group Night In! Sasha got a bunch of snacks, face masks, and Mellow Mushroom pizza and my group had a sort of slumber party in the lounge area of our floor. After the movie, we had some karaoke time. It was so lovely to bond these girls that I’m going to miss so much.