Baud Attitude

I’m coming up on the end of my AA degree, a nominally-two year process that will have stretched out for three years by the end of it.

I have good reason for this.

If I’d started off with a full load of courses and realized that it just wasn’t going to happen, it would have been embarrassing and expensive.  Instead, I took five classes over the first three terms, concentrating on ones that were heavy pre-requisites, the sorts of things I really didn’t WANT to take.  Writing, speech, college algebra… Not things that were relevant to the plan of getting a degree in Japanese, but at the same time things that, if I couldn’t hack it in, I wouldn’t get any degree at all.  After those first three terms, I switched to full time and took classes like statistics, psychology, drama, economics, chemistry…

I did occasionally have to explain to people that, yes, I was trying for a Japanese degree, and that, no, I didn’t see any real contradictions in going to college for five terms before enrolling in my first actual Japanese class.

But I digress.

My plan has been to finish up my Oregon Transfer AA degree in Spring of 2009, and it’s looking like I’ll hit the mark there.

That leaves me two years short of the whole Bachelor’s degree thing.

A solution comes to mind here, which is to find somewhere else that will let me take classes and hopefully eventually issue me a degree.

The obvious candidate for that was the semi-local State university, which would have let me stay right where I am and commute about 20 miles each way for school.

That made perfect sense until, oh, the whole gas crunch thing and also our rent jumping by 20% over the last two years as a new management company bought our complex.

Sucking up the rent boost in order to stay put and drive forty miles round-trip at least three days a week sounded kind of dumb, so we were looking at moving closer to school.

On the other hand.

The hard part about moving is the “putting stuff in boxes and in a truck”, right?

Once it’s in a truck, moving, say, 100 miles in the opposite direction to go to the slightly-less-local school with the much better-known Japanese program isn’t all that much more difficult, right?

With this in mind, I put in an application to them, mindful of the fact that their reputation for having good programs came with a bit of a reputation for being difficult to get in to.

That came back yesterday, approved, with all of my community college course hours neatly assigned to the equivalent courses at the four-year college, and it looks like I had better get ready to box stuff up over the next eight months.

So, Tuesday, in the space of about 60 seconds, I found out way more about a Japanese classmate’s vocabulary, fetishes, and imagination than I ever expected to.

See, we were covering a new grammar point, basically “Have you, in the past, done x?”

And to practice this, we were doing drills, from the textbook, in pairs.

And it’s mostly stuff like “Have you ever eaten octopus?” “Have you ever taken a train?” and we’re supposed to answer with the answers from the textbook, as provided.  It’s repetitive but I think it’s good for you.

Anyway, I’m doing this grammar practice with another guy from the class, who is a decent sort.  He’s a little advanced beyond where the class is, which makes him a good partner; he corrects me if I flub which is really handy.

Anyway, we’re going back and forth, and it’s his turn to ask me a “have you ever?” and he gets this big-arsed grin on his face, because the question is “Have you ever been a waitress” and the answer is “Yes, five years ago.”

So he asks me if I’ve ever been a waitress, and of course, I answer yes, five years ago, and that’s when he decides to get cute and - in mock surprise - ask me if I’m being serious.

I answer yes, of course, I’m serious, and switch to English to say “in frilly uniform.”

He gives a derisive snort and replies “Yeah, I can just see you in a hadaka apron.”

There was a pause, as if the universe were holding its breath.

Then he unleashed a wail of pure agony and buried his face in his hands.

Apparently he’s cursed with a vivid imagination.

And apparently I don’t look very good in a hadaka apron.

Nine hours being the amount of time that today’s Geology homework took, and this actually being the quickest all term that I’ve finished my week’s homework in the course.  I started at noon, as usual, and I’m actually going to be able to do something BEFORE bed.

This for a rocks-for-jocks 100-level course that’s only going to get me four credits.

Basic’ly, science courses are all screwed up in the effort-to-return ratio. This is not the first time I’ve bitched about it, but every time I do, it helps me cope.

Sociology is going rather better.  Granted, it took me five hours on Friday night to finish up my midterm paper - OK, I should come clean, it took me five hours to start, write, and finish up my midterm paper - ending with me finally getting to go to bed around 2AM, but it was more than made up for by being one of about five people - 20% of the class - who actually had their papers done.  About 40% of the class elected not to show up at all, and the remaining 40% all showed up with various excuses on the theme of “but it was Halloween last night! How could you expect me to finish a paper?”

I got some enjoyment out of the teacher telling them that he perfectly understood, and that they were welcome to turn the paper in later the same day, or at any time during the week, or even as late as next Saturday’s session…

…at a cost of one letter grade.

Got up this morning a little after seven, went to work, worked a full day, went to school for an appointment with my advisor to make sure I’m on track to graduate in the spring.  Finished going over what credits I had and what I still needed, got home around 7:30 PM.

Washed a few dishes so I could cook dinner, made up a rather nice dinner for the two of us - Lemon pepper tilapia, potatoes and green beans, some brown rice - enjoyed a brief bit of relaxation, then checked the syllabus for Japanese class and realized that I had a total of 9 pages of heavy writing due tomorrow.

Right now, at 11:15PM, I’m done with 7 of them.  I’ll get the other two done tomorrow on lunch.

Once I get those done, I have, let’s see, several chapters to read and some discussion questions to write up for Sociology; those are due Saturday morning, also I have two Geology chapters to read, a bunch of discussion questions to answer, and a lab to do for Sunday night.  Fortunately, I can do the Geology work Sunday morning and afternoon; that means that I can actually treat Saturday afternoon and evening as a weekend.  I really can’t express how much I’m looking forward to that.

All this and it’s still early in the term.

It’s going to be a rough one.

OK.

So I took an online chemistry course last term and it was an exercise in frustration, not the least because the instructor took his own bloody sweet time about getting our assignments graded.

Put this way:  During the course of the term, we had nine lab assignments, nine bookwork assignments, a midterm, a final, and a term project.

As of the day of the final, we’d gotten grades for four of the bookwork assignments, two of the labs, and the midterm.

So: We all went into the final without having gotten any feedback on 2/3rds of our work for the term, and a couple of my fellow students quite rightly took the professor to task about this on the class forum.

His response, unedited:

“no i let it go too long and shouldn’t have. i knew alot of people were drop (statistically 50% do) so i knew if i waited a while, i would halve the amount or grading. But I shouldn’t have left you hanging like that. apologies.“

You know, I have tried several times to come up with an appropriately scathing slam.  I just can’t do it.  Every time I try, I get about a paragraph in and realize that it’s an incoherent mess of rage.

At least the class is over and I can look forward to next term… after my Psych exam today, anyway.

Back in high school, I was an unabashed science geek. The requirements for graduation were, I think, 6 terms of science. I took 24. Chemistry, Biology, Physics, assorted applied sciences… I was pretty damn nerdy.

So I didn’t expect a simple CH100 class - better known as “Chemistry for People Who Can’t Do Math” - to be pissing me off quite so much.

I mean, the book work is great stuff, a little deeper than I expected from a 100 level course but I really won’t complain too much. Read a reasonably thick chapter, answer four or five pages worth of problems based on the text, take a weekly quiz, take a midterm. Been getting a lot of 9/10 and 10/10 scores.

The lab portion, on the other hand, is a godawful amalgamation of arts & crafts projects that aren’t being tied into the book work at all, and for which we’re getting bugger all feedback.

The first day of class, we all got a bag of chemicals. We got a lecture on chemical safety and wearing safety goggles and how to clean up our areas and keep the pets and kids out of things.

Our first lab involved mixing some chemicals in drop quantities and observing visual changes. We used 4 of the 20 or so vials of assorted chemicals we were given in our chemical bags.

The next three weeks were spent building small scale balances out of drinking straws and pins.

Then we built spectroscopes from cereal boxes and plastic knives.

Now we’ve been looking through the spectroscopes at various lights and coloring in little pictures of what we see with crayon.

I am given to understand that, as of week 8, we will be performing another lab that actually involves chemicals. Which seems like quite a novel concept for a chemistry class.

In the meantime I am having a really frustrating time building balances and coloring in spectrum, because I’m discovering a crucial hole in my abilities.  My balance falls apart if you put anything heavier than a quarter-gram in it (it’s supposed to have a 10g weight limit) and my spectroscope turns everything into a blurry rainbow mish instead of the clearly defined bars I’m supposed to be seeing.   I can’t even tell that there IS a color between “violet” and “blue”, no matter how many times I read about this mythical “indigo” color that goes in the middle.

Unfortunately, my general confidence that I’m doing pretty well on the “lecture” portion of the class doesn’t help much, because - even though the “lecture” represents 75% of the final grade - you cannot pass the class unless you get a 70% or higher score in the lab portion. That means, if you follow the math, that you can get a 92% in the class and fail.

And I’m not sure how I’m doing on the labs because the teacher hasn’t graded anything since our first lab assignment five weeks ago.

So, to hell with it. If I manage to pass the class, I will be happy to see it in the rear view mirror. I have no idea what I’m going to do for the other two terms of lab science I need to take to graduate, because this one class has managed to turn me from a science geek into someone dreading the thought of the next science course.

School is done for the term, so I have a blissful couple of weeks where, instead of juggling homework + Japanese studying + work, I just have to worry about work.

My  last final - and it was quite a bear, I managed to get the top score in the class with a whopping 83% - was in Statistics, a class where the teacher started out the term by splitting the entire class into four-person groups.  All term long, we’ve been doing assignments and taking tests as a group, so we got to know each other better than normal.

With the end of the class approaching and our little group about to be cast to the winds, obviously we needed to celebrate the act of surviving the term.  This is when one of our members piped up with a “let’s all go ice skating!”

I’ve only been ice skating once before, back in high school, and I fell down, I remember, seventeen times before giving it up.  There was a little girl on the ice rink who seemed the embodiment of the devil - I would climb to my feet after a fall, push off, get a little ways further along the ice rink, and this little demon would zip by out of nowhere and do a spin or something in my peripheral vision, and I would fall down again.  Not that I am bitter.

Nonetheless, it was so far removed from the standard suggestion one gets in college, which is to say, “Let’s all go drinking!”, that I felt I ought to agree solely on principle.

So.  Final done, it comes the night of the Great Skating Experiment, I get to the ice rink and discover that two of our four have decided to blow off the whole ice skating thing for, admittedly, fairly decent reasons.  The remaining member is the woman who suggested the excursion and who, I come to find out, used to ice skate, three times a week, for fourteen years.

I am quietly glad.  It means that there will be fewer witnesses.

My classmate shepherds me around the rink once.  It ain’t pretty, but I don’t fall down, even when she gets all “Cutting Edge” on me.

And by Cutting Edge, I do not mean that we started off with mutual hatred that translated into Olympics-winning skill, I mean that she took to saying “Toepick!” with a particularly twisted glee.  Oh, and “Bend your knees!”… often.

Having done the initial shepherding, she apologizes but she really has to go for a bit at her own pace, so I am left bereft of partner.  No problem.  I did this once, right, how bad can…

In the next circuit, I fall down four times.  I do not fall gracefully.  I go from roughly vertical to flat on my arse with all the skill and grace of a bag of flour.

The worst part is not the pain.

The worst part is the kid standing over me.  He’s, I’m going to guess, maybe 12 years old.  He’s like four feet tall.  He’s wearing a Lnyryd Skynyrd  T-shirt, which reminds me rather vividly of the days when I was 12 but which seems out of place on a modern 12-year old.

And he’s saying things like “Are you OK, MISTER?  That was a pretty hard fall, MISTER.  Do you need help up?”

Somehow I managed to drag my ancient and hoary self to a bench.  I adjust my skates, which is to say, I tighten them.  A lot.  This is the sum of my advice to you, should you ever find yourself in the situation where you are ice skating: Your skates are never tight enough.  I was not adequately warned of this basic axiom, so I pass it along in the hopes that it will save someone else a “are you OK, MISTER?” situation.

After that, I managed not to fall down again for the rest of the night.  I’m not going to say I was ever far from the comforting embrace of the wall, but I got to the point where I was actually enjoying myself and it felt like I was getting a heck of a good workout in the process.

Today, I have a glorious assortment of bruises - I will not subject you to pictures - and I am sore in muscles that I am SURE should not have been being used by skating. I am, however, getting mostly sympathy at home, and only a little bit of the “you know, you’re not a kid anymore” speech that I so richly deserve, and I mention this as an example of what a wonderful wife I have.

I think I’ll give it another try sometime, though.  That is, once this set of bruises fades.

And then I hated “The Purple Rose of Cairo” which I saw after I was told “Oh, Last Action Hero was just a rip off! You should see the original!”

And now I have found a new level of hate in Pirandello’s “Six Characters in Search of an Author”, which I have now had the unluck of reading for my English Lit (drama!) class this term.  To make matters worse, I now have to put up with the class discussing the play, so I can’t just say “Damn, that was horrible! Glad I only had to endure that once!”… it will be dragged on for the next week or two.  It puts me in a mood to start throttling.

Fortunately, it’s an online course, so (1) my fellow students are safe from throttling and (2)  I can submit my online discussion posts without them being affected by tone of voice, body language, uncontrollable sneering, that sort of thing.

It is possible that my hatred for this piece of drama might not be so pronounced if I was actually seeing it produced.  I am still befuddled by the idea that you can teach a “drama” class where the students just, well, READ plays, but I am not so counter to this idea that I will not take the four credits and happily get on with my college career.

It is also possible that I might not hate it so much if it hadn’t come after “Othello.”

“Othello” was an enjoyable three weeks of the class, mostly because Iago is one evil son of a bitch.  Seriously.  Anyone who thinks to themselves “I’d like to be an evil bastard.  Where should I start?” should take lessons from this guy.

Going from Othello to “oh look see some of the characters are actors pretending they’re characters and some of the actors are acting like they’re actors who are playing characters and oh look how META I AM” was about as much of a paradigm shift as going from… mmm… a very good thing to a very bad thing.  I’m not much on the metaphor tonight.

I will put it like this:  Were I given the choice to 1) re-read this play or 2) go looking for Harry Potter slashfic… I would be browsing harrylovesdraco.com before you could say “you don’t need to answer right now.”

Disclaimer: If there is really a web site named “harrylovesdraco.com”, do not tell me, because I am already hanging on by a thread.

Thank you, and good night.

My statistics class is the single strangest math class I’ve ever been in.  Day one of class, we all got put in to little 4-person groups and we’ve been doing 90% of our work in these little 4-person groups.  The only time we’re not doing everything as a group of 4 is during tests, and even then we get to take the test a second time as a four-person group which can improve our individual scores if we do better as a group than individually.

This is a math class.  I’m kind of used to them being intensely solitary classes, so this is weird, but at the same time it’s working pretty well.

I get an e-mail from one of my group members tonight.  We’ve got homework due tomorrow, and it’s 20% of our final grade, and she’s not sure she’ll be able to find a printer, so could I please print it out?

It’s in OpenOffice format.  A .odt file.  I do HAVE OpenOffice installed, so I could open it - and, yes, I printed it for her because I’m not a bastard - but, really: OpenOffice can save .doc format files.  If she’d sent that .odt file to someone without OpenOffice, about all they could say tomorrow would be “uh, I couldn’t open your file. sorry about that.”

In other school happenings, I have an Economics midterm coming up - 50 questions, all multiple choice, 36% of our grade for the term, but I’m finding that Microeconomics, at least, is pretty damn common sense stuff.  Not too worried about that.  I also have an English midterm, which a little more worrisome because it’s, you know, creative writing, but less worrisome because I seem to be on the teacher’s good side - and, with stuff that gets graded subjectively, that counts for a lot.

I did get to meet some of my English classmates recently - unusual since it’s an all-online course - as our teacher arranged for us to go to a local theater production of “Grace”.  It wasn’t to my normal tastes, seeing as I usually confine myself to the comic-sci-fi and light-fantasy end of the literary world, but I thought that it was a good play, that the ending was a little depressing, and that it presented the matter of finding faith in what I thought was a pretty positive manner…

…and then I logged on to the classroom discussion board and find that it set one of my classmates off into a frothing-at-the-mouth rant with Randomly capitalized Words and All CAPS emphasis about how anti-Christian it was.

It was weird to have gotten such completely different messages from the play, so I’m left wondering if I missed something, or if he missed something, and - of course - which interpretation the teacher is going to look upon more favorably when we have to do the inevitable paper on it.

I think I may dodge the issue and talk about the technical direction, because whether you see it as a pro-faith or anti-faith message, the lighting and sound work were both excellent.