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news:
8-year-old student
drops jaws at CSULB
By Irene Howard
Special to the On-line Forty-Niner
Kit Armstrong is
making history at Cal State Long Beach.
Armstrong is currently
a student at Los Alamitos High School and is taking general
physics at CSULB. The 8-year-old said he wanted the challenge
of taking a college physics class.
Neal Breslin, a
teaching associate, said he was quite surprised when physics
and astronomy department chairman Alfred Leung told him that
there would be a 8-year-old enrolled in his general physics
lab in the Fall 2000 semester, but Breslin found Armstrong
to be extremely gifted and enthusiastic.
Armstrong loved
doing experiments, Breslin said. Of more than 80 students
in his lecture class with Dr. Kuan-Wen Chuang it was evident
that Armstrong was the top student.
"I am honored
to have the opportunity to teach Kit physics," Chuang
said.
Without taking
lecture notes, he absorbed all of the instructor's lectures
and earned the highest score in the class, Chuang said. He
asked profound questions and often called out the correct
answers to problems even before the entire problem was given
to the class.
In his physics
100B lecture and lab in the Spring 2001 semester, his instructors
had the same experience, Chuang said.
"It is really
amazing that he has the maturity to understand physics concepts
that are puzzling to our undergraduates," Leung said.
In addition to
being a gifted science student, Armstrong has studied piano
since 1997. On October 7, 2000, the Pacific Symphony Orchestra
performed Armstrong's "Symphony No. 1 in F Major,"
and played the first movement of "Mozart's Concerto in
C Minor, K491" with Pro Art Symphony Orchestra in Walnut
Creek last March.
Last October, Armstrong
also performed "J.S. Bach's Concerto for Piano and Strings
in D Minor, BWV 1052" with the Long Beach Bach Festival
Orchestra.
Not only has Armstrong's
talent won him respect among the music community, but he has
also won awards for his ability.
He was awarded
first prize in the Music Teachers' Association of California
State Piano Concerto competition for his performance of the
third movement of "Mozart's Concerto in A Major, K488,"
last July. He has won first prize in the MTAC State Composers
Today competition three times and has performed his own pieces
at two state conventions.
Armstrong is also
a scholarship student at Chapman University and his chamber
works, "Piano Quartet for the Millennium," and "String
Quartet in B Flat Major " were premiered there.
While wearing a
brightly decorated helmet riding a skateboard, one would never
guess he is the same boy wearing a Sunday suit belting out
a piano work form one of the great masters of music in the
Crystal Cathedral last April.
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