This is my first blog post, and I don't really know what I should write. By quick to judge, I mean a wide range of things here. This is a very unfiltered version on how I think about life, and remarks in hindsight.
Essentially, I'll break this down into three types of thinking; judging others, judging a task, and judging myself. To be clear, I do try what I think is my best to be a man of faith, and I'm very much aware that Matthew 7:1-3 [1] explicitely states the hypocrisy in judging another when you yourself are blind. So judging is mostly bad inherently, so why do I do it?
“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?"
Judging others
Isaac Newton's third law says all things have an equal and opposite reaction. This hasn't just had applications in physics or even science at that; Kant's philosophy shares glimpses of this universizability that Newton had spoke of. It makes sense, since they were on the same continent at the same time.
When I was a sophomore at PHS, I had a impeccable track record. I had 0 absences, being at the right place at the right (sometimes tardy) times. I submitted most of my assignments on time, and was avidly checking the Canvas calendar. In terms of getting things done and being there, I had no issue whatsoever. However, I very much expected the same results from my teachers as well. I expected tests graded ASAP, since "literally a machine can do it" and "it's literally their job". I mean, both statements are not inherently false, that's remained constant and if anything more true than ever, with the rise of AI. So, what changed in my outlook?
In the summer of 2026, I was accepted to the Program for Algorithmic and Combinatorial Thinking. I was originally accepted as a Group I student, or first year, which is what I was supposed to be since I didn't attend PACT in a previous year nor did I attend the year long program. However, less than a week in, I was the only student in PACT 2026 promoted to Group II out of Group I, and this was a big honor to me, since the program had hundreds of brilliantly gifted kids. Group II was meant for students who had been in PACT before or undergrads/grad students. I'm eternally grateful for this opportunity. Anyways, in Group II, I was delegated the task of mentoring and being a TA for students in Group I. This meant answering questions, grading tests, all the fun stuff, all while attending lectures on advanced topics such as randomized algorithms. I was honestly very good at grading in the earlier weeks, where I'd set aside some time to grade, sometimes use the rubric sometimes just solve the problems myself. I was thinking that I already was "lacking" a bit since I didn't give any feedback of "Correct!", it was only when there were issues. But, in hindsight this is a nonexistant issue. But grading is hard! As the weeks progressed I began to actively like the computational problem sets, since the submissions tended to be shorter and more straightforward. If the number was wrong, it was wrong, and I'd immediately start looking for the error. Proof based problem sets were different though. I had to manually look through the entire proof for rigor and accuracy, and sometimes people didn't think the way I thought, and we used slightly different techniques to prove it. I was thinking for split seconds "wait don't we have Lean for that?", but I stuck to myself and didn't use any aids. Call me old-fashioned. The point is that grading wasn't really as simple as I'd thought, and keep in mind I only had like a single digit amount of mentees. To be fair, doing a good job and doing a job are different things. I legitimately put effort into making sure my mentees were actually like learning the content, and sometimes I felt like my teachers sophomore year just straight up used AI or graded sloppily. I mean, there is nuance to that, but these are baseless claims (besides sloppily), and if anything I should be slower to judge them for that.
Honestly, this really helps me appreciate more fully my teachers who have been absolutely excellent, and there have been many. In freshman year, I had a firm but fair biology teacher, and her thing was that she'd try to return assignments the day of. Man, you have to like absolutely love your job to be doing that. Like I really did enjoy PACT throughout and had the diligence to grade homeworks and tests, but if you're telling me I had to either watch Spain vs Argentina in the World Cup final or grade problem sets, easy choice for me.
Judging Tasks
Here's a good example. When I was a rising sophomore, and just completely cruised through Pre-Calc Accel, I thought that AP Calculus BC was going to be a different beast. And I was right. Sort of.
Parkinson's Law states that "work expands to fill the available time". [2] What if we put a twist on that and say "the difficulty of X depends on how hard you thought X would be"? It's like a placebo effect in a sense, if you think it's gonna be hard, it's gonna be hard. If you think it's gonna be easy, it may be easy. As someone who likes science, maybe I don't have enough data points to accurately draw this conclusion, but these are just some thoughts so we can run with this in this writing.
When you throw together phrases like "AP" "Calculus", it sounds very prestigious and difficult. After a A in the class, a 5 main and subscore, I can confidently say it is not all that. AP Calculus BC is a very smart and clever way to link neat things together, find car speeds, and find the areas of weird shapes. This is all too much of a simplification of course, but I was thinking in the other direction too. Partially I will objectively say I didn't have the best Calculus teacher at PHS, but the issue is that I had just completely gone in a different direction of thinking than I had in Pre-Calc Accel or Algebra II Accel. Maybe my brain is growing? Who knows. If you ask me whether or not I thought BC was hard, I'd tell you it's 100% possible to learn everything in 24 hours. But back then, I'd tell you "oh shoot this is hard" or "yeah I need to study 8 hours per unit test". Obviously hindsight changes everything, but would it have been different if I thought about it as just another class? Probably.
Am I saying everyone should try to cram BC quickly? No. Actually nobody should. Calculus is the most fun curricular math class I've ever taken. I don't really question that. It's just overhyped in my opinion, but also for good reason; it's arguably the most important STEM AP class and test you can ever take, and at least for PHS students, it's the primary issue for Princeton University math placement. You have to be good at calculus, and that takes time. I also did use tutoring to expedite the process of understanding truly what calculus implied in the mathematical realm, and by no means was calculus easy for me; it just wasn't "Super Hard Difficult Math Class" (which is what I originally thought), but rather the subsequent class of Pre-Calculus Accelerated.
Judging Myself
There's been times where I underestimate and overestimate myself. Here's a easy example. I seem to bite off a bit more than I can chew at times, and like being a leadership figure in like a good amount of clubs does not help. Whilst it's true that I could "larp" a position, my pride prevents me from doing that, and I'd like to do whatever I do well. This is hypocritical for those in The Tower right now, since I really don't do much, but hopefully I'll write an article and add a couple new features to the website soon. Essentially, hackPHS has been wayyyy more than I thought it was gonna be in terms of work, mainly because I forgot to send out the high priority emails months ago and instead sent them in August, as well as not being on top of my finance team enough to hound them to get the emails out, but that's in the past now so what can I do about it? I originally thought about the ideal situation, where everyone does their work on time and it's split equally. Welp, there goes that. It's alright though, and I'm not really that mad because I was kinda doing the same thing last year too to be honest.
I have more thoughts on what I consider "real" versus in modern day terms "larp" or "fake", but that's for another time when I remember to give some thoughts on the internet. :P