Today has been one of those days where I feel the need to write something, but nothing too terribly exciting has happened lately. I guess I could tell you about how adorable Allie is as she's laying here at my feet alternating her attention between her new toy duck and trying to get the last piece of Milk Bone out of her Kong, but I'll spare you. I've decided to instead tell you about my moment of exasperation I felt this weekend.
There are some things that pretty much everyone who I'm close to knows about me. One of those is that the subject of mathematics and I share a relationship filled with mutual hatred and loathing. We are not kind to each other, it tricks me by making me think I actually understand something only to toss in some new piece of evilness that makes me question everything I've ever known, and I call it names such as stupid and useless. It's quite an abusive relationship that I will thankfully be out of (hopefully for real this time) at the end of this semester.
Because of this extreme hatred that we share, after I threw a slight temper tantrum when I discovered that thanks to changing majors I'd have to take Probability and Statistics, I decided that rather than torturing myself and yet another teacher who would have the impossible task of trying to teach me math, I'd take it online instead. Everyone thought I was insane, but let's get real, most everyone already thinks I'm nuts anyway so that's nothing new. They all gave me many reasons to not take the class online, some of which included, "you'll have to teach it to yourself" and "you don't usually actually learn much of anything in an online class". But I ignored those pieces of advice, and so far haven't really regretted it. See, I don't do well in math classrooms. I'll be fine for the first couple weeks, but as soon as we hit something that I don't understand, I get frustrated, stop listening, and spend the rest of the semester drawing spacemen in my notebook and having a self-induced coughing fit so my friend can open the bag of chips she brought for us to snack on, without being noticed. My point is, I usually ended up teaching myself the material the couple nights before exams anyway, so it's really not that different. As for the not learning anything, that's probably really accurate, but because I do not care in the slightest what the probability is of pulling a green marble out of a sack filled with 8 red marbles, 3 green marbles, and 14 yellow marbles, I'm not too worried about that. Also I don't see what any of this has to do with computers, just saying.
Anyway, as with most Fridays, I had two math assignments due at midnight last Friday. Knowing that I was going home for the weekend, and trying my hardest to be a responsible student for once, I decided to break it up and finished the first one Thursday night. I figured I'd have plenty of time to do the second one Friday. After all, my only class on Fridays ends at 10:50, and Mama normally doesn't get here to pick me up until around 4, how could it possibly take 6 hours to do one math assignment? HA! I worked on the same assignment from 11 until Mama got here at around 5, then worked on it at home from about 9 until midnight and still didn't finish.
Let me pause for a second to tell you how this online class works. On each homework assignment we only have to answer enough of the questions correctly to pass and we get a 100, we also get unlimited attempts to do these assignments, so in theory you should never make less than 100 on any of the homework. On each assignment there is a certain number of strikes you get based on how many questions are to be answered. If you use up all your strikes, you have to start over. On this particular assignment I got 3 strikes, so as soon as I missed 4 questions I was done and had to start all over. I really wish I'd kept a count of how many times I only needed to answer one more question correctly to be finished, only to miss it and have to start over since I'd already used up all my strikes. It also made matters much worse that some of these problems were so long that it might take 45 minutes just to do the formula for a single question.
Even though I'd missed the due date, I knew if I turned it in Saturday I'd still be able to make a decent grade. So I started working on it not long after I got up Saturday afternoon.
Fast forward to slightly before midnight on Saturday night. I'll even set the scene for you. Allie was playing with her duck in the floor between me and Mama. Amazing Grace was being sang on the TV by whoever was on the episode of Country's Family Reunion that we were watching. I am just finishing up the final calculations on the last question of the assignment, I have no strikes left. The heat was on, make it or break it, go big or go home, and any other sports-like cliches you wanna add. The contents of the message box that would pop up when I clicked "submit" would determine whether I closed my laptop and rolled around in the floor with my dog who was trying her best to wait patiently for me to finish, or throw my laptop across the room in anger at the idea of having to start all over..
I took a deep breath, and with a trembling finger clicked the submit button. The split second between the click and the appearance of the message box seemed to take an eternity, I waited with bated breath as finally the pop up appeared on the screen...
"Well Done!"
It was all I could do not to scream with happiness, I was so thankful to finally be done. But the story doesn't end there.
A few minutes later I decided to look at the progress report and see how much I'd actually gotten taken off for turning it in almost a full 24 hours late. I scrolled down to the assignment in question and read "Dropped" printed beside it's name. I had no idea that the lowest grade or so gets dropped in this class. I know I should've been happy. That means my homework average is still 100% , which may help a little to balance out the not so great grades that are sure to occur on the face-to-face midterm and final exams that I will not be able to Google my way through. Sure, that's great, but think of this. If I'd have known that grade would be dropped, I definitely would not have spent 90% of my weekend working on it.
And that is why I hate math. Even when I think I've won and kicked it in it's teeth, it still has a way of biting me in the butt. It is for that reason that I stick by my position that math is stupid and I hate it.
That is all.
Until next time, stay awesome.
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