Group 3: Jingyan Lu, Lianru Li, Jiayi Yao, Qingyue Zhang

Jingyan Lu:

What I like especially about the math league is the teaching methods of the American professors.
I suppose that everyone have noticed some differences between the Chinese and American teaching methods during the lecture.
Let’s first talk about the classroom layouts. In China, the dests and seats are formally set, so that the students can focus on what the teacher says, and not be distracted by others. But it is different in America, the seat can be easily moved so that it would be easier for them to discuss with each other.
And what Chinese teacher like to do is simply give away all the knowledge to their students, this maximize the knowledge being taught to the students and it saves more time. And almost all the homeworks given to students should all be done by themselves, without other people’s help. But what the American teachers pay more attention to is the cooperation in a group and the creativity of students, so they also hope that the students would find out the new knowledge according to what they have already known. And then they let students read books and learn by themselves. The homework given to students are more likely to be team work, so that the team could be more united.
So based on all these facts, Chinese students might be better on doing exams, and American students might be better on doing team work and something that needs imagination. And that also decides the different jobs they’ll do in their future.
So what I learned during the math league is how to solve a difficult problems with the group members and to ask your question barvely.

Good morning everyone! Today I’ll mainly talk about how our team went through the team and relay rounds.
In these two competitions, everyone on my team was excellent. We had a clear view of collaboration. During the team round, some of us were in charge of finishing questions 1 to 5, while others completed 6 to 10. I was trying to do two of the questions, after I had completed the questions, I went to help my teammates. Some had trouble with the difficult questions, we worked together to solve most of it. Sometimes we argued for which was the correct solution, but we aimed for the same goal: winning the championship. So we worked together to complete the questions.
The next part was the relay rounds, our team discussed about the positions we should be seating in. I was in seat number five, I believed that it was the most essential position. I was very nervous because our team’s fate relied on my hands. However, the problems where rather easy and my teammates did a good job. When the results came out, it wasn’t as good as we thought. But I understood a lot more about team work and what it takes to be a good team.
In these rounds, I realized only by working efficiently together can we achieve success. One person’s power is weak, but when it becomes a team, we’ll be unstoppable.

Today, I will talk about one of the cultural differences I noticed between China and America when people eat together. More specifically, I noticed there is a difference in how each person gets his or her food during a meal together.
In China, when a group of friends get together to have a meal, the friends collectively order the dishes. There is not a clear rule on who should order what dishes. Sometimes, each person orders a dish of his or her choice. Sometimes, a few people in the group get the honor to order for everybody in the group and in that case, not all of the participants get a chance to order his or her preferred dish.
In the US, almost every time at the dinner table, each participant orders his or her own dish and drinks.
Occasionally, people share food with their neighbors, but the main course and the drink for certain will be ordered individually.
The commonality between the two ways of dinning together is that people socialize at the dinner table, talking about topics of mutual interest with your neighbors. The difference is that the American way ensures that each individual participant gets what he or she wants for food and drinks, where as the Chinese way is less precise, but there is a larger selection on the table to choose from!

Lianru Li:

Final presentation group 3 Lianru Li. I believe one of the most impressive activities in the camp would be the trip to Princeton University, which was not only fantastic and thought – provoking but also very watery indeed.
The buildings here are sort of British style. On the ancient stonewalling climbs wildly the ivy of forest green. In side the building was where hundreds of boy study and do experiments hundreds of years ago Sculptures of different shapes and meanings could be seen almost everywhere in the campus.
What impressed me most is actually the art museum inside. From ancient China paintings to daily necessities of African tribes; from Egypt coffins to Roman sculptures; from classical oil painting modernism work, the museum contains a huge amount of art collection, including the real piece masterpieces of different culture and time period. Students there can borrow the paintings and appreciate the masterpieces without glass or railing. All these actually showed a big difference between China and America in the understanding of art. In China, art seems to be far away, it’s like some kind of luxury that only a special group of people, for example top scholars can enjoy. The real pieces are very carefully stored or maybe even locked, no one would ever think of communicating with the masterpieces face to face sometime. One of the reasons of this is that Chinese art works are mostly ancient and breakable so for the safety of the art work, they may not be opened to public.
In America, the ticket of galleries and museums are much cheaper, people from all status are willing to and are encouraged to visit the museums, beauty can be see almost every where. So it seems to me that in America art is actually a part of people’s daily life, which in my mind was the most graceful respect towards art. Because in this way, people can really combine life and art which are indeed the same, and feel the beauty of both of them. Thus people can have their own opinions towards the world and can be more graceful.

Jiayi Yao:

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During our study, it is inevitable that there will be failures and there will be success.
As we all know, “Failure is the mother of success.” But not many people can really understand what the saying means.
There always many troubles in our life, so we must face failure. In fact, failure is not fearful, but important thing is how to face it correctly. Facing failure, people will never take their fate lying down. Not being courageous to face setbacks, people have no chance to enjoy the pleasure of success. Difficulties happen all the time but we should not be afraid of difficulties. Never give up and do our best, is the best way we to beat difficulties. The suspicion, was born with the human nature, starting from birth. There are things we must have “suspect” attitude to face, because get suspicious, it may progress, it may find the truth, it may succeed.
In spite of our tendency to think of reality as the non-negotiable basis of our experience, the definition of changes every time someone pushes the boundary conditions of conventional wisdom. When our perception of reality changes, our behavior changes accordingly, based on what is newly considered possible. At the same time we learn to get suspicious, we should also make corresponding efforts to confirm our suspect, and in the process proud to be careful; do not fall into the trap.
All we have to do right now is open our mind to the possibility that the world is made up of a countless array of experiences from the very worst to the very best. As someone once said, “A mind is like a parachute – it works best when open.” Especially learning math, if we open our mind be will enjoy the beauty of mathematics, the happiness mathematics brought us, enjoy a more abundant and fulfilling life.