First Day of School

9:15AM
Just arrived in the lounge, I have fifteen minutes to my first class, and I'm already out of breath. The worst part of the morning is that I have to climb the Matterhorn to get from the parking lot to the main building! Something like 75 steps. Which is why I'm sitting here typing instead of hunting for room 303: I'm catching my breath, and waiting for my heart rate to drop to a tolerable level!

Guess that means I'll be getting into shape, as well as getting educated this semester!

10:15 AM
Well, so far so good. I've gotten through one class orientation: History. The professor seemed cool, and he seemed to have the same idea I had about how to approach history. That approach is basically that dates, names of battles, and which general fought for which side is stuff that can be found just about anywhere. What's more to the point is how everything worked, what led up to things, how the Big Picture comes together. He calls himself a "chalk and talk" teacher: lots of lectures, and we need to be prepared to take a LOT of notes.

Good thing I bound a new book just for this class, huh?

Even better, at least for me: Professor Mahan is all about the reading, and all about the writing. We have a listing of what we need to have read each day (and there's a lot), and we'll be required to write serious analyses of each book we have read for class. Ooooh, I'm going to love that!!!! My two favorite things, together in one classroom!!!

Weird moment: one of my old students from my days of tutoring math, Justin, is in class with me. I must have made a good impression on him, back in the day, because he asked me to sit with him, he talked to me while we were waiting for class to start, and he bragged to all his friends that I was his old math teacher. Justin is a good kid, and he was fun to have in math. It's nice to have a familiar face, a friendly face, close at hand as I start off on this new adventure.

5:00
I didn't have the time to write after computer class, and after my math class, I ran (waddled) for the car just as fast (slow) as my little, fat legs could carry me.

The computer class, the one I thought was going to be a bird course, it looks HARD. Quizzes every Monday, they're going to be going really fast, and already I'm having trouble with my network log-on. Grrrr..... But the teacher, Professor Childress, is great, very cheery, very full of energy and fun. That makes things good. AND, I've already made a good impression on him: I was the only one in class who knew what USB stood for (Universal Serial Bus), even though I'm the Old Broad in class.

BTW: Thomas, you almost lost the NEC. I sat down in the front row, and pulled the NEC out to take notes. Professor Childress practically snatched it out of my hands, and declared it "really nifty."

Then there was Math Class: Intermediate Algebra. Professor Conley is the only really professor-y teacher I have. He looks, moves, talks, and acts like the stereotype: a bit ponderous, but dedicated, you know? He managed to work me into a bit of a lather at first. Math is the class I've been worried about, because it's been twenty years since I sat down in a math class, math was always the subject I had problems with, blah blah blah. So the professor spends twenty minutes talking about, "you need to be sure, absolutely sure you're in the right class, you have to have passed this or that to be in here, and if you didn't, you need to handle it right now, etc, etc...."

Well, I DIDN'T pass the previous class to get into this one. I got all the way to Calculus in high school; that qualified me for this class. But high school was a long time ago, wasn't it. So I'm sweating it, right? Maybe I'd made an error.

Then he comes out with this test. Seems the math department is looking to develop a more revealing placement test for incoming students, and they're all testing it out on the classes this year. It doesn't count towards our grade; it's testing the test, not us students. He also says the test is graduated; if you're supposed to be in this class, you should start jamming up around question twenty, because that's where the Intermediate Algebra questions start coming up.

I was up to question thirty, before I started having troubles. I had to leave three questions blank, which is more than respectable. The test relieved my anxiety. If I can get that far before I start jamming up, then I'm probably in the right class.

I've got homework in every class, so I need to go work on that. More later!