Ridgeway Alliance [RA]; Hudson Country Montessori School [HCMS]; Approved Workmen Are Not Ashamed [AWANA]; Rye Country Day School [RCDS]; Carnegie-Mellon University [CMU]; Reed College [Reed]; Westchester Community College [WCC]; Portland State University [PDX]; Clatsop Community College [Clatsop]; Brooklyn Law School [BLS].

I began at RA for preschool. My teacher was Mrs. Phillips. I don't remember much about this time of my life, though there is a cute picture of me around this time smiling in front of a poster featuring various basic shapes (circle, square, triangle, hexagon, etc.), in basic colors. I also did a brief stint in Ridgeway Elementary, where I wowed the kindergarten teacher with my reading abilities to the point where I was propped up in front of the second grade class to demonstrate. I didn't stay there for very long, though.

Around the time I started first grade, I entered HCMS. The curriculum there was, as with most Montessori settings, very free-form and unstructured, which was mostly to my liking. I had already learned the basics of arithmetic from my dad at a younger age, so when I got there, the beads and tiles and workplans were mostly just enrichment on a subset of math that I was very well acquainted with, which gave me quite a bit of an advantage. I was reading at a 6th grade level and beyond 6th grade math by the time I was in third grade, and by fourth grade, the proctors (it feels weird to call them teachers, they didn't teach anything) just gave me insanely arduous long division problems to do (like 349887983452354 divided by 324 or something).

Also around this era of my life, I was enrolled in the AWANA program, wherein I memorized oodles of bible verses for trivial prizes such as candy and small 99 cent store toys. To this day I credit my memorization skills to this early formative experience. Of course, it also taught me the basics of the Christian canon and the Abrahamic religions, but that was only to bear fruit much much later. To this day I can recite John 3:16 and Romans 6:23 by heart, though most of the specific verses have faded.

I had to repeat fourth grade as a condition on my admission to the independent school which would set the trajectory of my academic career, RCDS. Some highlights include: being the 5/6th grade geography bee champion as a fifth grader, scoring full marks on the entry level National Latin Exam in 7th grade, being crash coursed on the intro level of computer science education at my high school during cross country preseason in order to be with my friends in APCS who had taken the half year intro course prior as prerequisite, incorrectly explaining in a convincing manner how the Fourier Transform worked at the 2013 USAYPT Acoustic Interferometer physics fight at Harker School, the few but proud pins I made while varsity wrestling 108 (often against 120s), running the Nike Cross Regional 5K (not the invitational, the open) in the freezing cold trails of Wappingers Falls, playing 1st clarinet in Holst's First Suite for Military Band in wind ensemble.

Oh, and in the summer between 11th and 12th grade, I got to take classes at CMU via the Advanced Placement / Early Action (AP/EA) program. I took 15-122 with Viktor Adamchik and 21-127 with Andy Zucker. Adamchik's class was a gauntlet for me even though I was a year past the APCS exam (I actually took an advanced topics in CS class that RCDS offered, wherein we did things like showcase like ten different sorting algorithms, write a chat program with threading, and devise "agents" (minimax with alpha-beta pruning) for reverse checkers). Zucker's class was a firehose (he just got out of Caltech at the time right after winning the math prize there, he wasn't even a year into his PhD, so he had no grasp of how to calibrate difficulty) wherein we did some naive set theory, point set topology, and a full construction of the real numbers using nested Cauchy sequences.

[to be continued]