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.  🙂