2000-06-02
I have class, posted at 18:18:43
Epiphany in Baltimore has moved to epiphanyinbaltimore.blogspot.com It's been a fairly busy week, and I haven't had much time to update.It feels really good to be a good student again. Both of my PLS courses are going terrifically. I'm attending them, and that definitely helps. But I'm also doing the reading and studying as I go. This is in direct defiance of my strategy I've employed the last couple of years, which is basically to skip a lot, get the notes from someone, and cram. I'm finding this is working a lot better. I received a perfect score on a quiz in one of the classes, and the comments were along the lines of, "Super! Outstanding! This is what I'm looking for from quizzes and on exams!". It really felt good. I haven't excelled at academics in so long. My GPA in college will end up being fairly decent, but my apathy has prevented it from being where I think it could be. I wish someone would have grabbed me and shaken me during some of my low times and made me study, but oh well.
My teacher has called on my twice in the last two class days, and I hate it. I bombed both times. I rarely participate in my classes, and this hasn't changed this semester. I'm always careful to not look up when the teacher is waiting for a response, or to look like I'm busy copying stuff down. This time, I really was. I really didn't hear the question very well, and didn't know the answer. I stammered. It was embarassing. It also freaked me out that the teacher knew my name. I'm not sure how that happened. I've gotten through college with perhaps 5% of my teachers knowing my name by face at the end of the course. I know that's not the way you're supposed to do it, but I haven't exactly been the model student, have I? Anyhow, the guy knew my name and I didn't know the answer to the question. Then he did it again this morning. A bunch of people were raising their hands, then he said, "Let's hear from someone not among the usual suspects. Hmmm. Mark, how about you?". Now, this happened at the recap point of the day, in which the teacher asks questions to the class based on the previous day's lecture. During this whole time, I'm making out flash cards based on his questions (the questions tend to show up on the quizzes). No one else is taking notes during this time, and I'm scribbling furiously. I do it every day at this time. But he calls on me, and I barely heard the question, and I only knew half the answer. I had to ask him to repeat the question, and he chuckled to himself, then I didn't really know the answer because I wasn't blindly following along in my notes answering the questions like everyone else does. It really sucked. I'm pretty embarassed in there now. Two days in a row, I feel like my teacher called me out and embarassed me. It felt like high school. I guess it's his way of saying that the 15% participation grade on the syllabus will actually be followed (I find that teachers often don't really factor this in, or use it as only a fudge factor). I still didn't much like it. I enjoy going to the class, and enjoy the teacher, but I didn't like this aspect of things.
I kind of prefer my other teacher this semester, who when he handed out midterms the other day and instructed us that we had better put our names on the paper because, "I've made no effort whatsoever to get to know you, so I won't be doing any detective work to figure out whose test is whose."
He said it comically, but it was true.
I'll talk to you later.