Winter Session
Brr! The temperature was in the high 30’s when I left the house this morning for statistics class. Yes, it’s the same class that I dropped because it was too much to handle during the five-week summer session. And yes, the winter session is only four weeks, so this is even more intense. But this teacher is different: very pleasant and easier to understand. I had no trouble staying awake (lapsing into a wide-eyed coma was my downfall last time). It will be much to my advantage if I can do this now. It should be (I believe, I hope, I insist) the last lower-division “general ed” course I ever need to take. It will be the last math class I ever have to take. (Hallelujah!) I’ll be able to take Italian 6 in the spring without the burden of a math class to interfere with my real work (as algebra did). And, if everything goes as planned, I’ll leave Pierce College behind and enter CSUN in the fall.
Photo from clipart.com
Labels: general ed, math, weather
Unfortunately I forgot my camera when I left the house this morning. Snow was visible on the mountains. The temperature was just under 50F, and I figured it would get warmer. Ha! Although I had a hat and jacket, I was not adequately dressed for the wind chill as the temperature dropped and it began to rain. Between tests I took shelter in the cafeteria and the student lounge.
Although CSUN has closed applications for lower-division students wishing to enter in the fall, it is still accepting them for upper-division transfer students. Students are strongly urged to use the “easy” online application system. It requires filling out page after page of information. As I neared the end, an error on their part (yes, really) prevented me from completing the process. So I printed out the paper application (8 pages of application, 9 pages of additional paper-wasting material) and will be mailing it promptly.
Wednesday was a busy day on campus. The “Free Speech Zone”, which usually hosts only the Bible ladies and an occasional salesman or two, was the venue for a political-religious group with huge, provocative posters, handing out flyers to passersby. According to reports in the school paper, some past demonstrations have led to shouting matches, but as far as I could tell, nobody got loud on this day. The campus police were posted a few yards from the edge of the zone, just in case.
Is pretending to do something as good as actually doing it? Some people think so. At some schools, students who are too squeamish to dissect a frog are allowed to pretend to dissect a cartoon frog. As someone who recently dissected a real sheep’s brain and compared it to pictures of sheeps’ brains, I do not believe for a minute that one is the equivalent of the other.
I used to think that the people who finish their tests and leave the room first are the smart ones who know all the answers. But I have come to realize that more often the opposite is true. The student making an early departure is likely to be one who has simply given up. He doesn’t know the answers, so why spend time struggling with them? It doesn’t take much time to mark some random guesses on the answer sheet, and there’s no need to go back and check for mistakes when you wouldn’t be able to recognize them anyway. These guys usually look happy when they turn in the tests, and why not? They aren’t worried about how well they did; they already know.
I can’t remember which political conference it was that introduced the concept of the “Free Speech Zone”. That is, a zone designed to prevent free speech from being heard. It caught on rapidly and now it is my understanding that all major political events in the U.S. use this device. Still, I was a bit surprised to encounter this on the campus of Pierce College, whose newspaper proudly (if somewhat enigmatically) proclaims itself to be “a first amendment publication”.
