He Wants Answers

Man, do I owe my math professor an apology for my negative attitude!

When last we saw him, I was handing in my math test on Wednesday night. I felt good about how I did on it, and with that pressure relieved, I moved on with my life.

Then, last night, I got an email from the professor. It seems that there was an issue with my answers to one math problem (seen below), namely, that I hadn't finished it! I had correctly figured out how many people watched Survivor, American Idol and/or The Apprentice given the numbers he provided, and I was able to fill in the diagram correctly. But I was so focused on making sure I filled in the diagram correctly, I forgot to answer the questions that accompanied it! The professor wrote:

"I have attached your test page 2. Notice that you have all the numbers in the Venn diagram, but you forgot to answer ex. a-f using those numbers. I know that it was an oversight since you did so well on everything else. If you would send me those 6 answers, I'll use them to finish scoring your test."

I have emailed him the answers, and will receive my grade on Monday, a grade that I'm sure will now be higher than I deserved given the test I actually turned in.

So please, gentle readers, forgive my misguided rants previously directed at this sainted man! I don't know of any other teacher who would be so kind. I knew that he had dropped a hint or two to some students who were struggling terribly. For example, my friend K___ had only gotten a 38 on the quiz we took a week before, and Mr. N knew that she was really freaking out over the test. She told me that when she handed her own test in, he glanced at it and then asked her if she was sure about her answer to #3. She took another look and instantly saw the mistake he was referring to. He allowed her to change it before accepting it back. He may have trouble explaining things, but he's not an ogre and I'm going to make every attempt to be as fair to him as he has been to my classmates and I.

Potpourri

While working today, the topic of wanting to become president came up. I mentioned that when I was a little girl, I wanted to be the first woman president, but everyone told me I couldn't be. Now that it's become a possibility for a woman to be president, I no longer wish to be. Except for a small part that does, but not because I have any true ambitions in that arena. The only reason I still want to hold office at all is because I was told I couldn't. That's it. Not a very good reason to strive for it, though. Anyway, I don't have time to run the country- my schedule is rather full at the moment.

There's going to be a snow storm in the morning, and the t.v. station is running lists of school and community closings in anticipation. One of them cracks me up every time I see it:

"Trumbell Loves Children... Closed"

I guess the town only likes kids on sunny days.

Our Abnormal Psych professor was talking about families today. She was saying that everyone's family is crazy. Your family is crazy, but you're used to it. But when you meet someone else's family, they seem strange. They're nuts. "Yes, my family is nuts." she said. "But I'm comfortable with my nuts."

(I still laugh every time I remember this.)

Dusting Off and Moving On

I'm beginning to feel a little better. Thanks for your encouragement!

I was really down the other day. Our sociology professor had written our class an irate letter about our overall performance on that last assignment, and I could only agree with him regarding my own efforts. The uncertainty of my results from the other quizzes and tests I took added to my discomfort.

Happily, I received a 95 on my Abnormal Psych test, and I'm feeling pretty good about the math test I took tonight. I just need to keep doing the things I've been doing, and I'll be fine.

People ask me how I'm doing what I'm doing, and I thought about it. Which is ironic because the answer is: I don't think about it. I just do it. It's when I think about it that I start to feel overwhelmed, like I did the other day.

I'll just keep plodding along, making adjustments to allow for both sleep and study in addition to work and class time. It's already better than it was the first couple of weeks. And despite the whining, I truly am having a blast in school. I just need to remember that when I'm getting down on myself.

Morning

I've gone ahead and accepted the invitation to join PTK; I would have anyway. I'm still going to attend the informational meeting this afternoon, though, and get to know some of the other members.

I feel as though I'm slipping scholastically, though. In my efforts not to get so stressed out that it affects my health again, I believe I've gone too far in the opposite direction. Or, I'm so tired from the combination of work and school that I'm burning out. I fall asleep over my textbooks each night, and have trouble retaining information. I've just received a 17 out of 20 on my last essay assignment in sociology, not because I didn't understand the material, but because I was so sick of working on schoolwork that I glossed over things instead of going in-depth, just so I could be finished. I got the grade I deserved.

I also got an 88 on my first math quiz a couple of weeks ago, and have my first math test on Wednesday. I find out today how I did on my Abnormal Psych test I took last week. It was more difficult than her tests have been in the past, so I'm not so sanguine about an A there either. To top it off, I had to take a quiz in my Politics of Social Welfare class last Monday. While I knew the answers, I'm not sure I did enough. It was an essay test, and he gave us the questions ahead of time. He said it was going to be essays, but that they didn't have to be perfectly written; he'd accept bullet points. With this in mind, I wrote short paragraphs. But I was done long before anyone else, so I got nervous. I went back and scratched out my answer to one, and then rewrote it in more detail. Still done long before the others. I finally pushed the quiz aside and read from the text until everyone else was done. The class only meets once a week, and we didn't have school yesterday. I'm sitting here worried. Did I not put enough info into the essays? I know my answers were correct, but should I have elaborated more? But he said he would accept bullet points, and I did more than that... I won't know whether or not I did enough until this coming Monday, still days away, and I feel unnerved.

That's where I'm at. I feel as though I need to stress myself out a bit more when it comes to applying myself. I'm slipping, and I don't like the way it's making me feel. I'm not really sure how to do better when I keep falling asleep. I may have to ask to have my hours cut at the gas station, but I'm putting it off because I need the money.

Ugh.

I'm not happy with myself right now.

Honored

I have been invited to join Phi Theta Kappa, the international honor society of 2 year colleges. As a member, I would be eligible for several scholarships, and they also write letters of recommendation to colleges I want to transfer to, as well as potential future employers. There's an informational meeting Tuesday afternoon, and the induction ceremony is in April. My only hesitancy lies in the time factor. I can make the monthly meeting if I rearrange my schedule a bit, but I won't be able to take part in all of their activities. They do a lot of fund raisers for charity, etc., but between work and school, I simply don't have any time. If they are willing to work with my limitations, though, I've decided to join.

I saw a great bumper sticker yesterday: Chill globally, groove locally.

I'm off to groove.

Sequential Pattern

The following was on a recent math quiz. Quite a lot of people, both in my class and friends with whom I've recently shared this, can't seem to get the answer. I thought I would share it with you and see what you come up with. Please ignore the fact that the objects aren't always quite centered; imagine that they are for my sake. I got tired of trying to make it look perfect. Anyway...

Following the pattern of this sequence from left to right, what will the next image be?

Where to Stick It

I tend to anthropomorphize things.

It began when I was a little girl, shortly after my mother read "The Velveteen Rabbit" to me. I spent years trying to catch my stuffed animals talking and playing when they thought nobody was around.

If you think about it, it's not such a stretch to go from stuffed animals to things like, say, sugar packets. When I reach for sugar packets (Splenda, actually, but let's not split hairs. Or packets, but I'm coming to that...) and I come out with more than the desired amount, I'll try to put the extra back. Sometimes, though, one of the packets seems determined to stay with the ones I've chosen to use, and I feel guilty when I stubbornly put it back into the container.

Lately I've been ascribing human feelings to my Q-Tips. That's right, my Q-Tips. I reach for 3 every day; I use them to help apply make-up in addition to the more prosaic purpose of ear-hygiene. I reach into the box to remove 3, but often 4 or even 5 will try to come out together. This morning I found myself wondering: Why? Am I splitting two lovers? Am I breaking up a family? Or instead of trying to stay together, is that extra Q-Tip actually a runaway teen, rebelling against the constraints of family life in close quarters?

Then there's the question of which purpose the Q-Tip would prefer. Personally, I would rather help blend eyeliner than roll around in ear goo. But then I thought: that's so ear-waxist of me. After all, isn't that what a Q-Tip is meant to do? Perhaps the one forced to blend eye makeup is the one who feels disgraced, somehow robbed of its destiny. Does the rebelling teen still feel it was worth the humiliation of being used incorrectly in order to escape its family? Is the ignominy of waxlessness too high a price to pay in order to stay with one's paramour? And will the object of its desire still love that poor Q-Tip despite the fact that it will never experience the joys of caressing the whorls of an ear, or glimpse the tantalizing darkness of its canal?

The day had scarcely begun, and I already had the weight of the cotton-stick world on my shoulders.

Paranoid?

I think someone has seen Hitchcock's The Birds too many times. They ordered:

- A book on gulls
- A book on hummingbirds
- A book on making 101 spy gadgets.

Either they're taking bird watching to an extreme, or they suspect that our avian friends are up to something clandestine.

A Little Fun

While I'm busy finishing my homework I thought I'd share some fun and interesting links:

When you plug in your address, Zillow.com gives you an aerial view of your home, and its estimated market value, etc. Got my house right for the most part, but my in-law's home info was wrong. How about yours?

Also...

Forget party lines. Do you know which candidate really represents your views? Go to Vote Chooser and answer 10 simple questions, and find out how you match up with the candidates of either party. You may know the answer, but you just might not. Why not find out?

More from the Bookstore

We carry a book entitled "How to Read."

*G*

Observation

We're selling a lot of copies of "How to Cheat on Your Taxes" and "Hide Your A$$ets" these days.

More Politics of Social Welfare

The U.S. is the only major industrialized country in the world with a homeless problem. Even China, with its huge population, provides apartments for its indigent population.^*

The U.S. is an individualistic society, competitive by nature. We value self-reliance- that's how we work. Furthermore, we are a heterogeneous society, made up of many different cultures, and therefore different values. It's hard for us to come up with a consensus on how to handle anything important, and our homeless situation is no different.

Furthermore, the U.S. is unique in the way its government is set up. We don't have one government- you could say we have 51. We have our federal government, but each state also has its own. There is a long history of struggle between the federal and states' governments, which only complicates the process of coming to some sort of agreement on issues.

It's not that other countries don't have internal struggles on how to handle issues. That's only natural. However, other countries share a predominant cultural value system; it's easier to find compromises.

Thoughts?

^*If this surprises you, it surprised me as well.

4 Classes and a Wedding

Well, that was some week.

Mostly busy, but only mildly stressful until Thursday night. I went to take an online quiz for sociology, one which I thought would be available until noon the next day, only to discover that it had been yanked and I was going to get a zero on it! I freaked out a little- okay, a lot (I'm Type A personality, so I really had no choice) and I wrote to the professor about it. Actually, based on an email he had sent the class, I was right to have thought it was due by noon Friday, and I included that snippet of his email in mine. I wasn't snooty about it or anything, just said that I was confused. As a result, he reset the quiz for me so I could take it, and I got a 19 out of a possible 20. An A. Because that's the sort of overachiever I am. That Type A thing again. I also became involved in a tense discussion in that class about people on welfare. Everybody was on a "They're poor because they're too lazy to work. They just don't want to humble themselves and take those jobs that nobody wants to do." They went on to talk about how they work in a pharmacy (a couple of them are pharmacy techs- these people want to be nurses, but I guess only want to treat the people they consider "valuable" - their wording) and while working, they see people abusing the system. "One of them drove up to the drive-thru window in a brand-new 2007 car!" First, I observed that while people could take those minimum wage jobs that nobody wants, those jobs don't put food on the table, pay the rent, and cover the cost of utilities. And they don't provide health insurance coverage, so important for an individual, but crucial for a family. Then I pointed out that this student had no way of knowing whether or not the car belonged to this customer, or if it had been loaned to her so that she could pick up her prescription and/or run some errands, possibly even for the owner of the car.

Silence.

I agree that many people abuse the system; there's no denying that. However, it's also a fact that the average middle-class family with only one child not in need of welfare benefits (as "welfare" is commonly understood) receive more welfare benefits than a single mother receiving assistance does. This I learned in my Politics of Social Welfare class, which met for the first time last Monday.

Example 1: Every person who attended/attends a community college or state school is a welfare recipient. The reason these schools cost less to attend than private colleges and universities is because they are subsidized by the state through taxpayers' money.

Example 2 (my favorite):

- -The average single mother receiving assistance here in CT. receives $650/month for 21 mos. at which time her benefits are cut off.

- - It costs $12,000/yr. to educate a child in our public school system, paid for by property taxes. Supposing the middle class family pays $4,000/yr. in property taxes, that leaves an $8,000/yr. tab that taxpayers are picking up. We then multiply that by 2 to equal the amount of time a "welfare" mother receives benefits- keep in mind that children do not go to school 12 months of the year- and lets see what we get:

Mother:

$650/month
x 21 months
$13,650 total

Middle class family:

$8,000 yr for child's schooling
x 2 years
$16,000 total

Who receives more of the taxpayers' money? And that's if the family only has one child. Many have more than one, so we'd have to tack that on to their total as well! I don't have children, but I help pay for the education of other people's children. I'm okay with that: it's for the greater "welfare" of our society, which is what these taxes go to. They don't all go to those who need assistance; the majority doesn't. They go to people like you and me, for the children, the roads, etc. Some things we need personally, some we don't, but we pay collectively, whether we need that service personally or not. Someone is helping us pay for the things we need, whether they need it or not.

It's for the greater "welfare" of us all. That's what welfare is, not the common misconception of it.

So, that's what I learned this week, pretty much. That, and the fact that I am not good at inductive/deductive reasoning in math; I fail to see the patterns that others pick up on quickly. There are others like me in class, but as the vocal minority has a "Well, duh professor, how could you ask us such dumb, easy questions" the rest of us remain humbly quiet and try to figure it out on our own. We have a quiz on it on Monday, one which he says will only be about 5-10 minutes long. It could take me that long just to work out one of the problems which he says will be on it! Thank God we've moved on to set theories. That I get! It was a frightening beginning to an intimidating class, but it's getting better.

Abnormal Psych is fascinating, and I'm so excited to be taking it. This post has once again become long, though, so I'll get into psych another time. To reward you for making it to the end, I'll leave you with this one last, funny, non-college related thing...

In an ad for an upcoming episode of "My Big Fat Redneck Wedding"- and yes, there is such a show!- the groom turns to his bride and says:

"Now that we're hitched, let's go home and constipate our marriage!"