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Social studies was one of the subjects that everyone hated. Not only did we find it boring but what made it worse was that every week Mr. Maleknejad would spend half the period asking students to come to the board and answer questions about the previous week's lesson. They wouldn't even be so much questions but rather Mr. Maleknejad giving a section title and ask us to explain the entire section. To make matters worse he would grade us for our efforts. While he wouldn't do an exact average with whatever our written exam grade was for a total marking period grade, however, he would have our oral grade influence our overall grade.  I had been called to the board twice during the 1st marking period. The first time I had been completely unprepared (in spite of watching his routine for the previous few weeks). I had gone to the board and regurgitated what I had memorized the past few minutes for the section that I figured was next in line to be asked about. While I was ready to ...
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Hadi Partovi is a tech entrepreneur and investor, and CEO of the education nonprofit Code.org. Born in Iran, Hadi grew up during the Iran-Iraq war. After immigrating to the United States at age 11, he spent his summers working as a software engineer to help pay his way through high school and college. Upon graduating from Harvard with a Masters degree in computer science, Hadi pursued a career in technology starting at Microsoft where he rose into the executive ranks. He founded two tech startups that were acquired by Microsoft and Newscorp respectively, and he has served as an early advisor or investor at many tech startups including Facebook, Dropbox, airbnb, and Uber.  In 2013 Hadi and his twin brother Ali ‘94 launched the education nonprofit Code.org, which Hadi leads full-time as CEO. Code.org has established computer science classes reaching 30% of US students, created the most broadly used curriculum platform for K-12 computer science, and launched the global Hour of Code mo...
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While I continued playing soccer as much as I could in our backyard, however, with the weather getting colder, I shifted my attention to another soccer related activity. I became obsessed with putting together best 11’s from Europe and the Americas and then having them face each other. After determining a lineup for each, I would grab the report of a club match and simply substitute the real names in the match report and lineup with those in my lineup in the same order.  Finding top European players wasn’t that hard as most reports and highlight shows focused on them but I had to dig deeper to find those from the Americas in order to ensure that the lineup wasn’t dominated by players from Brazil and Argentina. Going through various soccer magazines I was able to unearth well know players such as Enzo Francescoli from Uruguay, Carlos Valderrama from Colombia, Manuel Negrete from Mexico, and Roberto Cabanas from Paraguay. Trying to expand my player pool I latched on the mere mention ...
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On Family guy Stewie felt Persian because he had gotten a white Range Rover. He claimed it came with an anti Israeli manual. I have never seen a car come with one but then again I have never owned a Range Rover.  
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Geography, and generally any topic that required memorization, was definitely one of my weaker subjects. The fact that the geography teacher would bring a few students to the board and quiz them on the previous session’s material did not seem to have any effect on me other than trying to hide myself in class in order to not get called upon. As my luck had it this particular day I was the first one called to the board. With the topic being Africa, the teacher asked me a few questions and in response I spewed whatever came to my mind. He finally asked me about the whereabouts of a certain ethnicity in Africa. Dumbfounded I blurted out that they were in northern Africa. “Ok, let’s go,” he said as he began escorting me towards the door to throw me out of class. “But that’s what it said in the book,” I protested. He stopped and grabbed a book and said, “Show me where you read that.” I flipped through the pages, unsure about where I was going with this, until I came to the page with a gian...
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