Bike Accident Day
With one VERY close head-on call, a a lateral pedestrian/bike crash (I was passing between the two, and a bollard, when the pedestrian headed right), and a head to side crash into another biker, I've had my fair share of bike accidents today, but others have it worse. Just after my first actual collision, I come across Shivan, who crashed, has a bent tire, and hit the right side of his head. This morning, Jin was in a head-on with a girl biker, and flew over his bike - luckily only with a profusely bleeding scratch on his leg (his bike was not as lucky).
All this makes me think that maybe I should consider getting my brakes fixed. Or my seat lowered.
OK. So our classes are taught by tenured professors, and IHUM section is taught by a PhD as well. But what happens to all the grad students then? Well, they all become TAs - sometimes required by the grad school. And, many of them become absolutely incompetent TAs. Take, for example, my Chem 33 TA. Which releases more heat upon combustion, n-hexane or cyclohexane. "Ummmm... I think n-hexane." "But what about strain?" "Umm.. I don't know what to say about that...". Auto-stupid. My CME TA? She took 8 points off of my homework, out of 72, for absolutely no reason, other than that 1. she looked at it wrong, 2. she can't recognize when its the same thing, and 3. she corrected according to a faulty answer key and KNEW that it was a bad answer key, yet didn't do anything about it. My chem TA did the same thing: corrected with a faulty answer key, and then didn't re-correct once he realized! Well, I eventually argued my points back, but that's because I'm a cocky bastard. When I get homework back with points off, my first thought is not, "Oh no, I did something wrong. Let's check what I did wrong so I can do well on the test." My first thought is, "WTF I don't make mistakes. The TA screwed up. I better quickly check what they fucked up so I can get my points back ASAP." Sure, I do make mistakes. But, normally I know about it, and I know I fudged part a, or screwed up part b, and expect those points off. Now, we've concluded that I'm a cocky bastard, who has now reached the point that she questions almost everything an answer key, TA, or even teacher says. I've had too much bad teaching to just swallow what I'm fed. What about the students who aren't so aggressive? "Oh, the answer key is different from what I did, so I must've screwed up. Let me re-learn things the wrong way now, and be confused for the rest of the quarter!" Things like this should not happen at an academic institution like Stanford.
Two weeks ago, I got paid $10 for a psych study. Last week, I got paid a ridiculous $50 to page-turn for a pianist in a concert (which was awesome, and fun to listen to, too). This week, I'm applying for (and probably getting) a note-taking position, which gives me $90 at the end of the quarter for anally going to useless lecture after useless IHUM lecture, which I would do anyway. Seriously, last quarter, I could've gotten money too, but I thought, 'what if I wanna ditch IHUM'? But honestly, I'm so anal and obsessive about collecting a full set of lecture notes, I always go. So hopefully that'll work out this quarter - I'll just have to actually pay attention in class and not zone out on AIM. I feel weird, doing all these random oddjobs for money - but hey, it's easy money, why not?