Well, to all people out there reading this, Happy Tuesday! Just a quick thought on the impracticality of Math labs. My math lab is taught by a grad student. When we are in class, he is about as excited as we are. There is nothing fun about a math lab because we just do math problems that were already assigned and all the lazy people copy the work off the board. For persons like me, the ROI of that class is approximately negative fifty. I go to the class to listen to the scratching of pencils and pens on the papers of those who just didn’t want to invest a little time in doing the work on their own. For the one time in five that I actually have a valid question, the TA just looks at my work individually and tells me where my error is. Usually I stare blankly at the wall in the front of the class and try to ignore the droning of the conversations that are going on behind me. The next reason it is a waste of lucrative time is that people leave all through the class. Half of the time, our TA cuts class short anyway, so I don’t see why you would want to get up, call attention to yourself, and leave right after signing the attendance sheet. And when I say class gets out early, I mean early. Sometimes our 50 minute class only lasts about 15 minutes. You can tough it out for fifteen minutes and not have to let everyone in the class know you are a slacker. Oh well, the dumb people will always exist, may as well just laugh at them now before I have to work with them later.
nrfirth | 
26 October 2004 1729 | 
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This weekend was a hard one to recover from. No longer am I young enough to bounce back from a weekend with literally no sleep, I am getting old. No, seriously, I am fine. I was surprised how not-tired I was during classes today. There are some times that no matter how much sleep I have, I really have a hard time staying awake. Hmm… I wonder why that is. Maybe it is the fact that the teacher has a monotone voice and sweats profusely while we are all huddling together for warmth to try to keep our fingers from becoming the victim of frostbite. But that is enough about that issue. It felt odd to be back in classes because Saturday and Sunday both kind of blended into one long day. I went for maximum comfort, going to class in sweatpants and a t-shirt with a sweat shirt if I was cold in the classroom. I don’t own any UNcomfortable clothes, it is just that I just wanted the MAXIMUM achievable comfort to go and sit in classes today. My grade got displayed for everyone in Chem today. She wanted to explain how the grading system online works, and so at the beginning of class she asked if it would be alright to show my grade as an example because it is good, but not perfect. I said of course, and everyone got to see my 91.9 average. By the way, I am working to bring that up.
Martinsville was the gathering place for all the country guys and gals that wanted to watch some cars go around “real fast-like.” I was in charge of checking people’s coolers as they entered the stadium to make sure that no one had glass bottles, umbrellas, or weapons in there. I saw more beer in those ten hours than I have ever seen in my life. At times there were kids who couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven and they were walking in with a six pack of beer for their parents. We were not worried about the AMOUNT of alcohol people took in, we were simply making sure that as they consumed all that alcohol, they did not 1) hurt people with a weapon, 2) hit people with an umbrella, or 3) throwing glass bottles down onto the track. It was loud and cold and people were not always agreeable about me taking their glass bottles of Jack Daniels or Smirnoff from them. In general, it was a blast! Most people were really kind to me and were appreciative of my work and understanding of what I had to do. This was a great money raiser for the Honor Guard, so I didn’t mind too much. We got back around 7.30 because we had to stop and have a little chat. That is not a good chat, but the details are still a little sketchy for me. The game was severely understaffed, that is why we got out so late. We were supposed to leave around 3.00, but after we finished and got all the cars unstuck from the mud, it was already around 5.00. Put a nice long drive onto the end of that after standing up all day and you will see that my legs were in agony. At least my fundraiser is over for this semester!
nrfirth | 24 October 2004 1536 | Comments Off
This is really the post for Saturday despite the fact that it is technically posted on Sunday. I went to the game, and it was very disappointing. 45-31 is NOT a good game no matter how you look at it. There was just no really fantastic play that we pulled out tonight. If you were watching it on TV, you might have seen me. I was the one next to the man who got taken away, behind the kid doing dip, and about four rows behind the row of guys with no shirts on and www.everystudent.com painted on their stomachs and backs. One thing about the game was that the refs seemed to really have it in for us. There were calls that, when they showed the slow-motion replay on the huge monitor, it was obvious that the refs had made the wrong call. And then there were a lot of times that the refs just didn’t call some things that even I knew weren’t right. If I know that they are incorrect or missing calls, every single person and their mother should be able to see it without any problem. You see, I am not the biggest football buff around. I know the rules and all that jazz; I just couldn’t talk with some knowledgeable person for hours and hours about what we did or didn’t do. At least I didn’t point my “First Down” in the wrong direction.
