Andi’s Blog…or life according to the voices in my head…

So, I finally started a blog, which means that certain people can stop nagging about it. I also started school this week, which means that my dad can stop lecturing me about going back to college. This does mean of course that he will have to find something else to lecture me about. Hmmm…will he move on to the “when are you going to get married and give me grandchildren” lecture? It seems to be a pretty popular one.

As for school, it seems to be going well for the most part. My initial expectations were as follows:
Scariest class – Anatomy & Physiology
Rustiest skills class – Algebra
Throw away easy A (although required) – Intro to Computing
In reality, my expectations were way off.

Although still a little scary in that I absolutely must make an A to insure acceptance into the radiology program, my anatomy class is actually quite pleasant. The professor is great. His lectures are engaging and he is capable of speaking plain English in addition to sci-speak. He also teaches the lab rather than passing it off to a TA. I’m not particularly looking forward to dissecting the cat and I’m especially dreading the sheep’s eyeball (squishy and icky) but I’ll get through that ok. Note: there is only 1 male student in this class.

Algebra had me worried. It’s actually the same class I aced in 8th grade and took up to honors calculus in high school, but I haven’t done any math since then that didn’t involve a cash register, so I pretty much assumed I’d forgotten it all. I need College Algebra for the program, but I decided given the fact it’s been over a decade I’d better start small, so I went back 2 levels to warm back up to it. The first day of class we had a pretest review for the pretest that is supposed to determine if we’re actually in the right class. I was amazed how it all came rushing back to me. I got everything right, I just wasn’t sure if I was actually doing the work right so I went to the review today and then took the test. I’ll know if everything’s ok next Tuesday, but I feel pretty good about it. I like my algebra professor a lot too. She seems to have a good teaching style and today we had several new faces in the class. Turns out they were in her pre-algebra class last semester and switched sections this week to have her again rather than the professor they’d registered with. I think that’s a good sign.

My Intro to Computing Professor is a complete moron. The class is kind of a joke anyway, but it’s required so I was hoping to get what I could from it. For starters it’s a 3 hour class only on Tuesdays, so it’s a really long class at the end of an already long day, but that’s the only way I could fit it into my schedule so I could go T&TH rather than M thru TH which should in theory make it easier for me to fit in a job (more on that in a couple of weeks I hope). The silly college scheduling people thought it would be a good idea to have the lab first and then the lecture. Professor Moron didn’t like this and insisted he couldn’t start us on the first lab until we’d had the first lecture. He then decided to kill the lab hour by rambling on about nothing. Someone in the class suggested what we were all thinking, that he start the lecture in the lab and then we could get out of the lecture an hour early just this once. I was all for that since this class was scheduled to end at 9:20pm and I had started my day at 9am for my first class. He didn’t like that idea and just kept talking about nothing. We had a 10 min break and then headed for the lecture room where he rambled for another 30 minutes about his hard-luck-life-story before talking about anything pertaining to computers at all. Then he explained that most of his lectures had 30-40 slides that would take him 1-2 minutes per slide depending on how much we asked about them. Everyone was VERY quiet, still somehow 30 minutes later he’d only gotten through 3 slides. He breezed through several in the next 45 minutes while still managing to go off on random tangents about his conspiracy theories and how his sister went from being a physician’s receptionist to being the nations top pharmaceutical sales rep in only one year. At 8:45 I thought I saw the light at the end of the tunnel; we had hit slide 30 of 31 and for a brief moment it looked like we might actually get out of there a tad early. Then he got on the soapbox about how social security will be gone long before any of us retire and he began to lecture about real estate investment property as the sure way to insure financial security for retirement. I almost walked out at that point as I have already heard this lecture from my father on too many occasions to count, but I thought that would make a bad impression on the first day. With only 13 people in the class, he definitely would have noticed me leaving.

After all that, I decided I needed a beer so I went to visit Lara at The Roadhouse. Luis was bartending too and we ended up talking about school since he’s also attending. He suggested I switch to the online section of the class. A little deliberation and a couple beers later I decided he was right. I had originally thought about taking that class online, but decided against it hoping that I might learn a little more about some of the software by actually taking a live class. As it turns out, I can’t imagine learning anything from this professor. He specifically stated that we were pretty much on our own for the lab assignments but he could answer questions (although probably not answers that actually pertained to the lab), so I’d basically be teaching myself anyway. Now it just makes more sense to teach myself online at home where I can go to class in my pajamas if I want to. I went online yesterday to do the add/drop thing but all the online sections are full. In the end I decided to just drop the class and take it online this summer. I hate dropping classes – it makes me feel like such a slacker. It’s just that I think that professor is so horrible that it would be a huge waste of my time and money to stay in his class. I’d probably end up making a terrible grade just because I loathe him so much.

All in all not a bad start to school after a VERY long hiatus.