Day 11: Splash 2006

We’ve now arrived at Splash 2006, which has, for my money, the worst design of any shirt in my collection (though there will be a pretty solid competitor in a few days). The dude who is splashing into the puddle is missing several crucial facial features that would confirm that he’s human, like eyes. The thing he’s splashing into is a puddle, not a pond or a lake or something that conveys the enormity of the knowledge that students can dip into at Splash. And there’s nothing on the back (for shame!). Anyway, that–and the fact that Diyang was making a big deal of how much she likes the shirt–is why I’m not smiling in this picture. Along with the 2006 recruitment shirt, this one is the other possibility for my first ESP shirt.

Splash 2006 was my first Splash (sentimentality!), but not my first ESP program–I had been teaching chemistry for Delve for a few weeks before Splash. It was directed by a pair of CS-genius sophomores, Nelson Elhage and Alex Schwendner. As I often have, I taught two classes–one good, one bad. The good one was my Banach-Tarski class, which ran during the very first Splash evening block in history, from 7-10pm on Saturday night. Because of the miracle of freshman year, I had plenty of time to write up incredibly detailed notes for the class, which didn’t stop me from getting lost a couple of times. Nevertheless, the kids seemed to like it, and I enjoyed it (enough to want to teach math for Summer HSSP that year).

My second class was called Abstract Algebra of Geometric Designs. I have an unfortunate history of coming up with classes that fuse a couple of things in an awkward way in the hope that it will come out cool, and this is perhaps the best example. My intention was to talk about groups, then point groups, and then wallpaper groups. Well, that would have worked if the class hadn’t consisted of several ninth-grade girls who hadn’t had much math before and one eighth-grade boy who was just as lost as everyone else. To make matters worse, I shelled out $20 for color transparencies that I never got reimbursed for. Whoops.

This Splash also continued (began?) the tradition of roping a frosh in for some inane reason and then correctly predicting that they would direct Splash the next year. In future years, these were Laura and Tony, Paul, and Michele; this year, it was David Farhi, who (I believe) was returning from some nightwork at 5:30 am when he ran into ESP setting up for Splash. He was promptly press-ganged into admin work (or at least help desk work) for the weekend. I still find it kind of ironic that I had spent the semester going to meetings and still had no idea what was going on, while David happened to be in the right place at the right time–with the right attitude–to suddenly vault up the ladder enough to have a we-need-to-keep-you-around-here’s-a-title position created for him at the elections meeting (that title was “ESP Liaison”). I’m kind of terrified at how much ESP relies on luck in recruiting our directors…

Day 10: Summer HSSP 2005

This is where I start outright cheating. When HSSP ran in the summer of 2005, I was not yet at MIT–in fact, as of the beginning of that summer, I was still absolutely certain I was not applying to MIT. The reason, if you can believe it, is because I didn’t want to be in a place so focused on math and science, with so many nerds. That was my actual line of thinking. Really. I can’t really comprehend what the hell was going on in my mind, nor why I had forgotten that I’m a serious nerd, too–I would estimate in the top quartile of nerdiness at MIT.

Anyway, that summer was my last hurrah as someone not thinking all the time about college (or, you know, being in college). As with the previous two summers, I was at PROMYS, a math camp at BU (yup, totally not a nerd, right?). This was the summer when I met my friend Phil for the first time (he and I still live down the hall from each other), as well as the girl I dated for the next year of high school (this is why, in a game of Taboo last year, I answered the clue “this one time at *blank* camp” with “math!”). It’s also the one where I started to figure that MIT was possibly not that bad a place, due in large part to a PROMYS counselor, Li-Mei, giving a tour of MIT that included my future hall (where she lived for my freshman and sophomore years).

But enough about me; let’s talk about ESP. The website from April 2005 is pretty entertaining to look through, if for no other reason than that it still contained a message that MESH 2004 would not be running–odd, since MESH had not run at all since 1998.  OK, this is for Summer HSSP 2004, but I think it’s remarkable enough to throw in here: that HSSP had a full day of registration, on June 19th, and classes started June 26th. Our current conventional wisdom says this is too early. Are we right? They also skipped what would have been week 2, July 3rd. At any rate, I have no clue who the directors for this program were, and equally little idea how it went. That’s history for you!

Day 9: Stanford Splash 2009

Today’s shirt (and today, for those who don’t have a calendar warped to take into account my lack of updates, is Tuesday, May 4) comes from Stanford Splash 2009–Fall Splash 2009, to be more precise, since Stanford runs a Spring Splash as well. ESP paid for me to hop on a plane to San Francisco in mid-October with Aviv Ovadya so that we could take a vacation learn from Stanford’s organization. Aside from hassles involving an immovable 8.03 exam and a crotchety 18.705 problem set, it was a pretty relaxing weekend.

Stanford’s fall Splash, directed by Michael Shaw and Dena Leeman, ran over a full weekend, Saturday and Sunday, during the morning and afternoon each day (an informal count off the top of my head has this as Mike’s sixth Splash). I taught my usual Chemical Sensors class, and Aviv somehow produced several enormous rolls of origami paper from the aether to teach Giant Origami, in which (I think) a giant Yoda was built. As with MIT’s Splash, there were tons of interesting classes–one of them, the ukelele class referenced on the bottom of the T-shirt, was taken up by a couple of my friends for Splash here.

I’m pretty envious of the space Stanford has for their Splash. Where we have to think of ever-more complicated check-in systems to get people not to trample each other in the morning, Stanford just puts everyone in their gigantic sunny quad right next to a very convenient drop-off point, and puts all their admin stuff under the collonnades along one side. They also conveniently have a teacher lounge right there inside one of the buildings, and an equally convenient parent lounge right around the corner. Really, it’s just ideal. Oh, and for lunch, they just put it in the middle of the quad. Done. Transporting 200 pizzas still requires a pickup truck and several carts, but it’s much more pleasant because it’s not November in Massachusetts outside.

I guess there’s only so much you can say about a Splash–it ran smoothly; teachers liked teaching and kids liked learning; admins didn’t get too burned out; everybody seemed fairly satisfied with it. Probably the only enduring memory I’ll keep from this one was the huge pile of fruit we posted to Reuse. Still not sure if anyone who came for it actually heard about it on Reuse.

Day 8: Recruitment 2009

This is the 2009 fall recruitment shirt–OK, the 2009 Rush shirt–which we wore and handed out in copious quantities at the Midway during Orientation. I’m not sure how well you can see the text on the front; it says “(Brought to you by the Ministry of Education)” over the new Vincent-designed ESP logo. On the back, we parody the slogans of Oceania from 1984 by replacing “Ignorance is Strength” with “Learning is Fun.”

Now, if you think the shirt comes off a little strange, that’s because, well, it did. First of all, we had a lot of trouble figuring out which slogans to put in which order on the back. The original suggestion, which came with the ominous subject line “The successor to ESPants”, was to have the original three 1984 slogans along with “Learning is Fun.” Ignorance being somewhat contrary to our mission, though, Paul threw out this one:

EDUCATION IS FUN
SLAVERY IS FREEDOM
PEACE IS WAR

Many people, myself included, completely failed to see the hidden message without having the letters carefully bolded for us. In the end, though, we decided for the message you see, with the explanatory “Brought to you by the Ministry of Education” and a logo on the back.

Wait a second. On the back? Yeah, somehow between Roshini’s computer and the Multyconcepts printers, the back and front got reversed, leaving us with the awkward parenthetical on the front. Hey, at least we didn’t follow the original suggestion for a front, which was the hopemongering  beaver at left (for other examples of ESP beavers, see Day 2, Day 5, Day 10, or some even later ones, which of course you’ll only be able to find after I post them).

As well as being a recruitment tool, this shirt was also sort of a celebration for our revamped website. As you may know, our old website looked terrible (the Wayback Machine can’t quite handle the suckitude of the background) and had major organizational issues. The new website, on the other hand, designed and implemented by Roshini (holy crap did she spend a lot of time on it) and Vincent over the summer, has minor organizational issues and looks terrific, and sports the circular logo on the front of this shirt as the primary thing on the homepage. According to Vincent, it was just supposed to be a simple placeholder. Oops.

Anyway, remember that when black is white and seven is nine, learning is still fun.

Day 7: Junction 2008

You could argue that this shirt–from Junction 2008–heralded a new era of ESP graphic design. At least, you might be able to argue that in another year or so, depending on how things go. The reason is that this is the first piece of ESP-related artwork designed by Vera Bradley color-lover and font connoisseur Vincent Lee, who was a student at Junction that year. As I understand it, the plan for designing the shirt was to hold a contest for the students, and then, barring extraordinary circumstances, just use Vincent’s design. One way or another, that’s what happened. The shirt design is pretty clever–the icons branching off the main trunk, which are not all that easy to make out, all represent classes that ran at Junction that summer. For example, the “NP” on the bottom left is Jack Hill’s Intro to Computer Science class, and the little fractal above it is (I think) Zandra Vinegar’s astrobiology/planetary science/astrophysics hodge-podge Magrathea class. There’s at least one more Vincent design coming down the pike on this blog.

Junction that year was directed by Niki Huhn and David Dalrymple, an interesting team in that one director was at least three years younger and simultaneously three years ahead of the other in school (maybe even more than three; I can’t remember). This is due primarily to David Dalrymple being sort of superhuman. At any rate, this year marked the beginning of a relatively fast transformation of Junction from a small-attendance, almost forgotten summer program (in 2006, it was directed by someone barely even in ESP) into the intense, teaching-intensive powerhouse it is today. (Note: it’s only a powerhouse this summer because I’m teaching for it. Just kidding. More like despite the fact that I’m teaching for it.) Teachers really started taking advantage of the length and depth of the program to do awesome stuff–as would happen the next year, someone taught a full Multivariable Calc course, for example. How many high school students even get a full class of calculus?

Even though I was chair during the program, I only saw bits and pieces of it, usually the ones involving opportunities for me to get dinner and/or free ice cream. Probably my only really distinct memory of the program was the strange meal of Peruvian food that David ordered for dinner one night (where did it even come from?). Along with some normal-looking stuff, it also contained an ear of maize with enormous, fleshy kernels. It was probably the strangest vegetable I’ve ever seen.

The reason I wore this particular shirt is that today (OK, this is the retrospective today) was one of this year’s Junction worksessions; our guest speaker was Scot Osterweil who, among other things, invented the Zoombinis learning game, which we got to see some samples from. It was really pretty interesting–the general idea was basically that if you can give students a way to productively “play” with the material (really play, not follow directions about which levels to do or whatever), they’ll understand it better and be readier to learn the technical details. This, of course, has gotten me to think about how to turn abstract algebra into a computer game. This can only end badly.

Day 6: Spark 2009

[Author's note: The hiatus is over! I'm not sure why I chose the last week and a half to be totally lame, but the buck stops here. I'll be putting up 3 or 4 each day for a few days until everything is caught up. For the record, I've still been wearing the right shirts on the right days--if you're wondering--but just not writing about them.]

Today’s shirt–”today,” in this case, meaning May 1–is Spark 2009, which was directed by Paul Kominers (currently chair) and Adam Seering (currently awesome). That Spark was a weird one for me–in the lead-up to it, I intentionally tried not to get too involved in it, since it was the first program after I had finished being chair, and I wanted to practice not being too involved. Those who know what I did for the rest of the year know how foolish this was. Anyway, I didn’t go to many of the work sessions or planning meetings leading up to Spark, but I was still planning on being there.

Then something happened.

About a week before Spark, my cousin, who was about a year younger than me, committed suicide. Out of all my cousins on either side, I was undoubtedly closest to him. He had been struggling for the last two years with alcoholism and drug problems, and had bounced between a few colleges trying to find a direction. After I found out on Tuesday, I spent the rest of the week working on problem sets with a sort of zombie-like dedication, and then headed to Albany that Friday for the funeral.

I don’t want to use this space to eulogize him, since I couldn’t do him justice, but I’ll say this. I’ll always remember him as a kid at some indeterminate age between 11 and 17–my memories of playing RISK or building Legos with him have an oddly timeless quality–which makes it oddly appropriate that now he’ll be tied to ESP in my memory a little bit, too.

And for those who have wondered what the sticker on my laptop is: it’s for him.

Day 5: Security I

I’ll keep this short, since this post is already nearly 24 hours overdue, and I don’t have that much to say about this particular shirt.

This was the Security shirt we gave to Splash volunteers to make them look all official-like from some year before I got to MIT until 2006 (Splash 2007 was the first use of the red shirts). The only Security I ever saw wearing this shirt was, of course, at Splash 2006, whose Security was run by Caitrin Jones. I’m not at all sure where or when I picked this shirt up, but I suspect it was part of the haul I got from the box sitting in the back of the office my sophomore year (see also: HSSP shirt from 5 years before I got to MIT).