School daze
My brain is starting to hurt. The second chapter of my A&P textbook is all chemistry. I had hoped I had left Avogadro's number behind when I took college chemistry as a junior in high school (did I ever explain here that I went to a teeny tiny school--my graduating class was 7 people--where classes like math and chemistry had to be done as dual credit with the community college because the school itself was located in a strip mall next to a Fudrucker's?). However, we have to understand pH, which means that we have to understand molarity. Dammit. We also have to know all about chemical reactions, atomic bonds, and the super-detailed info about things like the structure of triglycerides and the DNA molecule--down to the alternating sugar/phospholipid chains that hold all of the base pairs together. At least we can kind of leave it behind after this first exam. We'll have to know it for the final, but that's not until May. I have been taking detailed notes on the book, but it takes forever because the text is so dense. I'm thinking that I will just go with what's on the just-released study guide. I need to ask Sis, since she knows how this teacher and this class works...
A&P lab has been interesting. Our very first lab was a rat dissection. Interesting, but we got stuck with the most OMG super-annoying student ever in the history of annoying people. J is a super-controlling, OCD, ADD guy. He has to be the leader of everything, which causes the rest of us to be left without being able to learn as much. He feels the need to verify everything we do as a group himself, as if the rest of us are incompetent. I'm pretty sure I have 20 IQ points on this dude, and I CERTAINLY have more practical medical experience. What scares me is that he wants to be a paramedic. However, he's so anal that he has to re-read the directions of everything several times, and doesn't seem to be able to absorb changes from the main directions and how we're supposed to ACTUALLY do it. We were working on learning the microscope Thursday. We were paired up, and I was thankfully the fifth wheel at the table and was able to use one on my own. I kept looking across the table at a woman named Amy who is at least my age. She didn't get to look through the microscope at all until the last five minutes of our 80 minute class, because every time she tried, he shoved her away saying that he was doing it. He also couldn't seem to grasp that the microscope pictured in the lab manual was different than the one we actually used--ours is simpler and was missing a few of the things from the one in the book. I know I don't want this guy to work on me if he ever succeeds in becoming a medic. (I told Mom the other night that if I ever saw him as the medic when I needed an ambulance, I'd request that he drive and the other medic do the actual treatment, because there's no way I'd let him near me, since I'd be afraid that he wouldn't be able to go with the flow of a true medical situation where the rules are fluid.) After class, I went up to Amy and talked to her about how frustratingly annoying J is. We agreed that we'd never stick the other with him when working in pairs ever again. We figure that in a group we can overpower him, but one-on-one he's just intolerable. I have a lab buddy! Yay! Hopefully this will fix what happened last Tuesday when I came home almost vibrating with the pent up frustration of dealing with J for the whole lab time.
I'm trying really hard not to flirt with Courtney my English instructor. She's really cute, and we have a lot in common (she's a Whovian for Pete's sake). The kids in my English class continues to amaze me with their apparent lack of education. Maybe it's just that I'm 32 and grew up in a household run by a former English teacher, but the fact that, at 18-20, they don't know basic stuff like what a metaphor or euphemism is scares me. Courtney used a bit from The Scottish Play's final soliloquy as an example of a metaphor: "Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player, who struts and frets his hour upon the stage." None of the younger people in the room could analyze those two lines even vaguely close to what Shakespeare actually meant. If they're not studying Shakespeare in school, then we're totally failing them as human beings.
Anyways, my brain hurts, my body hurts from walking so much around the really gorgeous but really rather large campus, and I can't wait until my financial aid refund is disbursed--hopefully on Monday--so that I can go ahead and get that tablet which will allow me to stop carrying my ridiculously heavy laptop which has caused my body to hurt so much this weekend.
In political news, I'm very thrilled that President Obama was re-inaugurated Monday. I think it was really cool that it just happened to coincide with Martin Luther King Day. That's a sign if I've ever seen one. Yes, Beyonce lip-synced. Yes, it's kinda lame that she did so. But the Marine Band didn't play live either, so it makes sense (they probably couldn't because the brass player's lips would have stuck to their mouthpieces due to the freezing temps--I've seen it happen before). I do love what Aretha Franklin told NBC news the other day. She said she understood why Beyonce had lip-synced, because it was really hard for her to sing "My Country Tis of Thee" in the 20-degree weather four years ago. (I think it was slightly implied that a true diva would sing it live no matter what.) However, because of this, everyone is going to be watching incredibly closely when Beyonce sings at the Super Bowl. She better make sure that it's obvious that she's singing live, despite the possible problems of doing so.
A&P lab has been interesting. Our very first lab was a rat dissection. Interesting, but we got stuck with the most OMG super-annoying student ever in the history of annoying people. J is a super-controlling, OCD, ADD guy. He has to be the leader of everything, which causes the rest of us to be left without being able to learn as much. He feels the need to verify everything we do as a group himself, as if the rest of us are incompetent. I'm pretty sure I have 20 IQ points on this dude, and I CERTAINLY have more practical medical experience. What scares me is that he wants to be a paramedic. However, he's so anal that he has to re-read the directions of everything several times, and doesn't seem to be able to absorb changes from the main directions and how we're supposed to ACTUALLY do it. We were working on learning the microscope Thursday. We were paired up, and I was thankfully the fifth wheel at the table and was able to use one on my own. I kept looking across the table at a woman named Amy who is at least my age. She didn't get to look through the microscope at all until the last five minutes of our 80 minute class, because every time she tried, he shoved her away saying that he was doing it. He also couldn't seem to grasp that the microscope pictured in the lab manual was different than the one we actually used--ours is simpler and was missing a few of the things from the one in the book. I know I don't want this guy to work on me if he ever succeeds in becoming a medic. (I told Mom the other night that if I ever saw him as the medic when I needed an ambulance, I'd request that he drive and the other medic do the actual treatment, because there's no way I'd let him near me, since I'd be afraid that he wouldn't be able to go with the flow of a true medical situation where the rules are fluid.) After class, I went up to Amy and talked to her about how frustratingly annoying J is. We agreed that we'd never stick the other with him when working in pairs ever again. We figure that in a group we can overpower him, but one-on-one he's just intolerable. I have a lab buddy! Yay! Hopefully this will fix what happened last Tuesday when I came home almost vibrating with the pent up frustration of dealing with J for the whole lab time.
I'm trying really hard not to flirt with Courtney my English instructor. She's really cute, and we have a lot in common (she's a Whovian for Pete's sake). The kids in my English class continues to amaze me with their apparent lack of education. Maybe it's just that I'm 32 and grew up in a household run by a former English teacher, but the fact that, at 18-20, they don't know basic stuff like what a metaphor or euphemism is scares me. Courtney used a bit from The Scottish Play's final soliloquy as an example of a metaphor: "Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player, who struts and frets his hour upon the stage." None of the younger people in the room could analyze those two lines even vaguely close to what Shakespeare actually meant. If they're not studying Shakespeare in school, then we're totally failing them as human beings.
Anyways, my brain hurts, my body hurts from walking so much around the really gorgeous but really rather large campus, and I can't wait until my financial aid refund is disbursed--hopefully on Monday--so that I can go ahead and get that tablet which will allow me to stop carrying my ridiculously heavy laptop which has caused my body to hurt so much this weekend.
In political news, I'm very thrilled that President Obama was re-inaugurated Monday. I think it was really cool that it just happened to coincide with Martin Luther King Day. That's a sign if I've ever seen one. Yes, Beyonce lip-synced. Yes, it's kinda lame that she did so. But the Marine Band didn't play live either, so it makes sense (they probably couldn't because the brass player's lips would have stuck to their mouthpieces due to the freezing temps--I've seen it happen before). I do love what Aretha Franklin told NBC news the other day. She said she understood why Beyonce had lip-synced, because it was really hard for her to sing "My Country Tis of Thee" in the 20-degree weather four years ago. (I think it was slightly implied that a true diva would sing it live no matter what.) However, because of this, everyone is going to be watching incredibly closely when Beyonce sings at the Super Bowl. She better make sure that it's obvious that she's singing live, despite the possible problems of doing so.