College Kid.

I’m like a little kid. The list of school closings is huge this morning. The announcer goes through each one, alphabetically, like all radio announcers do.

K…. L…. M… “Mohawk Valley Community College, All campuses closed”

w00t!

Time to go back to sleep.

So it’s official. Today I started up the Spring 2008 semester at school. As I remarked to Earl earlier today, I’ve officially made it through more college than I did the first time around back in 1986. The feeling is quite pleasant.

My schedule is not unpleasant, I only have classes four days this week with Wednesdays being my “run errands, clean the house, visit friends, do homework” day. This schedule coupled with my DJ gig and freelance sound engineer jobs should work out quite well. I’m excited about the challenge. I feel like I’m going to do well this semester, despite the tougher courses. Let’s check that again in a couple of weeks.

The first class I had today was Math 122, “Fundamentals of College Mathematics 2”. Translation: “Calculus”. I’ve never had calculus before. My head is already swimming in imaginary numbers but I think I’ll have a handle on it once I review my notes and do the suggested reading. The professor is the infamous Professor Frightful and his Cast of Blackboard Voices again. There are several students that went through his class with me last semester and like me, they had a knowing look on their face when our other classmates heard the voices for the first time. Another unexpected delight is taking the class with First Earl’s niece Nanette. We took a couple of classes together a year ago and helped each other out on a couple of projects. She’s good fun and the only female in the class. Since there’s only a few of us from last semester’s all male math class, there’s a whole bunch of new eye candy going on.

So now I’m sitting in the library building working on homework and catching up on blogs. This is my favorite spot to do school work, as I can see across the quad and the people walking back and forth in the snow. I snapped a photo with my iPhone.

It’s not quite ABBA, but I’ll certainly take it. Tonight it’s about a big sigh of relief.

My liberal arts requirements are behind me, now it’s all about the Civil Engineering stuff.

So I just took the last part of my written Surveying I final exam. Given a set of readings, we had to do various computations to come up with a reasonable explanation of a piece of property, including it’s area, coordinates etc.

The way it works is like building a house, your readings are your foundation and you go crazy from there, building equation upon equation. But the foundation is key. The bearings have to dead on or your formulas go all cockeyed.

I completely froze. My mind went into this haze that was literally blinding me from accomplishing what I needed to accomplish. As I came to the realization that my mind was freezing and that the clock was ticking by, I began to panic. I made myself so nervous that I actually began to tremble, right there at my desk. In this panic I began confusing myself. And something that I could usually whip out in 30 minutes became a task that I could never accomplish given an entire day. It was like my entire mind short circuited.

So I struggled with some numbers and desperately tried to make them come out to something close to what they should have been. But without that solid foundation, I was doing nothing but grasping at futility.

Long story short, I completely bombed this exam to the point that I’d be happy with 10 out of 100 points. You can’t fill in the blanks and even guess at what you’re trying to do when you don’t have the right numbers to start with. The only bright side to this is that it counts the same weight as my other exams, leaving me with an 83, 85, 97, 110 and 10 to make up the exam portion of my grade, which is 1/2 of the total grade (homework and labs weigh in equally for the rest). I’ll be lucky with a B now.

I remember only buckling under pressure like that once before, and that was during a Regents* exam my junior year in high school. I bombed that as well.

I’m not usually one to buckle under pressure like that. I don’t know if I was expecting too much of myself, if I was getting some weird nervous psychic vibe from those struggling around me or what, but I disappointed myself and I feel like I let the professor down. I think I even wrote “my apologies” on the answer sheet.

Good thing I see this all as a learning experience. And the realistic part is, I’ll continue to live.

* New York State high school students take standardized Regents exam at the end of the school year to prove their competency in a given course. During my time in high school, you had to pass three math OR science Regents exams, and a Social Studies, English and Foreign Language Regents exam to get a “Regents” diploma. Those that didn’t pass the sequence received a “local” diploma. Traditionally, college bound students opted for the Regents route, blue collar and business students opted for the local diploma. New York has made the requirements considerably tougher for today’s students.

I just completed the last homework assignment for the math class from hell. Luckily it was a take-home exam that has a substantial weight on our final grade. I say “luckily” because I was able to take my time, think problems through and use notes to complete this and it may keep my grade from falling completely down the garbage. Tonight’s question is, do people really still play with square roots and factoring? Why factor when you can google. That’s what I always say.

I discovered today that Professor Frightful and his cast of voices in the chalkboard do not have a sense of humour. At the beginning of class he reiterated that our final would be two days, this upcoming Thursday and Friday. Feeling rather bold, I asked, “It’s a take home final, correct?”. He glared and the voices said “no” in a crazy chorus. So I pressed, “oh that’s right, it’s open book, not take home.”

He continued to glare and I heard the voices in the chalkboard say “We are not amused.” The rest of the class snickered.

In all of our other classes we’ve had the opportunity to fill out the professor performance survey, in which we rate our professor and learning experience on a scale of 1 to 5 except question #14, in which we must answer “3” to prove we are paying attention. Why am I not surprised that Professor Frightful hasn’t followed the lead of his colleagues? Before class began two of my fellow students mentioned how they had gone to the department head to complain and he basically responded with a “sucks to be you.” I find all sides of the conversation to be quite daring.

Nevertheless, the college experience comes to a temporary end on Friday at 1 p.m. Then we’ll have fun fun fun.

We are in the midst of our first significant snow storm of the season. It started yesterday with all the sleet and ice, this afternoon it converted itself to lake effect snow and 35 MPH gusts of winds. School was canceled until 10 a.m. this morning. Unfortunately, my first class wasn’t until 11, but there I was doing the “snow day” dance I did as a teenager, hoping Mother Nature would let me spend the day home.

No such luck.

Instead I got to complete part I one my Surveying lab final exam. I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not, but surveyors tend to do their surveying outside. We were reminded by our professor that surveying doesn’t stop for the Mother Nature, or at least surveying exams don’t stop for Mother Nature, so there we were, bundled up in three layers of clothes, a heavy jacket, gloves and a dorky hat trying to determine the angle between the iced over cement pad in front of a doorway and the nut of a fire hydrant. Thank the universe it was cold so no dogs tried to relieve themselves as I stood shivering by the fire hydrant making like a target for my classmate behind the surveying gun. I had to dance around a few times so the person doing the measurements could make out my outline in the blowing and drifting snow.

I didn’t ace the exam but I think I did o.k. I think one of the icicles in my beard knocked the equipment when I was futzing around because I was off by 10 seconds. No biggie.

Next week it’s part II – equipment setup time trials.

Last week I was thinking of creative ways to burn my math book and slamming every door in the house. This week I sat down and spent three solid hours studying and patiently completing my homework. I’m delighted to say that no math books were hurt in the process.

Two weeks and counting until the end of the semester. Must. Remember. To. Just. Breathe. I figured the “Balanced Living” shirt from Dr. Steve would help me remember to stay focused. I was right.

Whose woods these are I think I know,
His house is in the village though.
He will not see me stopping here,
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

Back in my senior year of high school every student had to memorise “Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost. As we stood on the cusp of graduation, one by one we had to stand in front of the class and recite the well known poem to our classmates. If we didn’t do it, we didn’t graduate.

I never figured out the importance of memorising that poem but I was thankful that was all we had to do in the poetry unit in English 12.

Fast forward 21 years to “English 102”. For the past three weeks I’ve had the task of reading an endless array of poems, “cracking them open” and sharing their meaning on the discussion board with my cyber-classmates. To keep it all interesting, we had to write about the works of one of three poets: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson.

I BS’d my way through a five page essay on the works of Dickinson. She was a recluse and she gazed out a window. Maybe she was a lesbian. I always choose the gay one. I’ll be pleased with any grade, I did the best that I could.

The theme of “Don’t Tell ME What To Read!” is going to continue right through the end of the semester and then my English obligations will be met. I wish I could wrap my head around poetry, I really do, but the closest I want to come to Shakespeare is watching an episode of Bewitched that features Samantha’s father Maurice quoting ol’ Bill himself. I just can’t get a grasp on the coy way of saying something without coming out and just saying it. Hell, I’ve never been able to tell if a guy was interested in me unless they walked up, grabbed my crotch and said “let’s do it now”, how am I suppose to know if a brow through forty winters is suppose to be an ugly old hag or not?

I have just one assignment left in this English class and that is to write a paper on “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams. Thank god they production is coming to the college so I can watch the thing.