Pardon My Panic
 

School.

OH MY GOD.

Winter quarter started this week. I have two lit classes, inductive logic, and astronomy.

We had a "diagnostic quiz" on grammar in a lit class on Monday. Now, keep in mind, I am a writer. I mean, I write for a living. People pay me to write. I got 54% on this quiz.

Boy, do I feel dumb.

The other lit class, so far, so good, we haven't done much yet except spend a whole 90 minute class INTRODUCING OURSELVES. Sheesh. Logic, well, that's kind of weird, but fun.

But Astronomy? It's a gen ed class, 100-level. You'd think it would be fairly simple, right? I'm looking over the ppt slides for tomorrow's lecture, and I read the chapter in the book, and I feel like it's going Right Over My Head. And not just in a punny kind of way, either. :thepain: You know, because it's astronomy. Oh, never mind.

Just pat me on the back and say, there, there, it'll be OK. Yeah. It'll be OK. Who needs A's, anyway? :headshake

You too, shall pass.;)

Maybe you were thinking of astrology. What's your sign?

LOL! Don't freaking panic. *smack*

Aquarius. Wanna drink? :rolleyes:

Oh shit, that's WATER bearer, not BEER bearer. I get those mixed up.

Oh my. You have my sympathy. And you'll be ok. It'll start to gel with you. Once it is you'll be fine. Don't put yourself under pressure to understand it immediately. And check out less intimidating sources for a quickfix explanation on some of it (wiki is great for that), particular terminology, or the big theories and scholars in the subject. I find that's really helpful.

But I know where you're at. I am also on the verge of outrght panic. I started taking a serious look at what I should have been doing accross the Christmas break. I don't know why I keep doing this. I end up woefully underestimating what's got to be done and then have a mad rush to try and rescue the situation. I did work last semester...but not like a 3rd year student. As of right now. Today. This stops. The next few months have got to be hard work and not much else. Here we go. Let's see if I can pull this off rather than sabotaging myself at the final hurdle.

In one week, I have an exam on eighteenth-century anglo-french relations. Military and diplomatic history isn;t my forte...and whilst I have worked, I haven;t worked enough and a ridiculous amount of this so-called revision, is in fact first reading. Not good.

One week after that I have to submit a 3000 word essay on 19th century class and gender history. I haven't chosen a question yet, let alone started the reading.

The following week I start a new module for which I have done precisely no reading. I also start back with my full year module for which I have done no prep.

Somewhere in this melee I have to finish (i.e start) a full dissertation plan. I know what I want to do with this, but my terms are still vague, I have yet to do the close textual analysis and I still need a third primary source to triangulate my hypothesis. My secondary reading consists primarily of very quick scan reads of multiple books, articles and collections. Close reading with notes is still needed for some of these.

I am shit at note taking. It's my biggest flaw as a student (outside of laziness, bad time management and a pathological inability to throw myself at anything unless there's a gun to my head) consequently most of this is carried around in my head until I absolutely need it. Which then involves a mad scramble as I try to bring to mind in which book I saw what tidbit. or I might have a page or two of notes from a text, but never completed taking notes from that chapter. So have to retrieve the book, or find an alternative source.

It's messy and frantic and on the whole i've got away with it...But I don't feel like I am as able this time. I dunno. Maybe it's just a low day. Did I feel like this this time last year? I think probably. But last year was just year two. This is the final year. There's no future module to pick up marks in. The weight of work is on this year, and the coming semester in particular.

Wish me luck. I am at a crossroads, and the turn I choose now will dictate whether i come away with a good honours degree...or actually fulfil my potential and come away with a 1st class honours degree. I'm starting from way behind where I need to be and there's more to do in this semester than in any other. I can't be as good as I was last year, I have to be better. I'm about to sit an exam in a topic I only vaguely fucking grasp. I've got six days to get my head around 100 years of diplomacy, war, social change and military development in two countries and as they relate to each other, bringing in other continents as they relate to the European mother countries. Yey.

You think you're freaking out? I was just informed that our university accrediting body will be randomly selecting thesis papers from my senior-level class to evaluate, just to check in and see if our graduating seniors know how to write.

They don't, of course.

So now, our school's ability to maintain their current level of accreditation is, in some small way, dependent on which idiot from my class's writing they randomly select to review. Oh, the joy.

Oh God. Smooth that really sucks.




[when I think of some of the total numpties that somehow manage to squirrel (buy) their way onto university courses, that sounds horribly dangerous. It also sounds like a potential start to a downwards spiral. A bad result and lower accreditation will mean fewer of the best students will want to go and more plces will go to the numpties...and so on. ]

Yeah, Dana and Smooth, your situations do seem more dire than mine. Thanks for the perspective.

I've given up on the honors degree. I could still do departmental honors, but with a job, husband and kids, I just don't think it's worth the stress. Better to focus on a good GPA.

At least I'll have the nifty Phi Kappa Phi cord at graduation. :D

IF I ever get there!

BTW, I have to write a 2000 word paper on "Araby" by next Friday. Just got the assignment yesterday and haven't even read the piece yet. Yippee!

Araby? 2000 words?

Obama is a bit Araby. *400.

:p

LOL

Sounds like this is just a quiz to assess where you are as the course begins. Good job! You positioned yourself perfectly for the dramatic improvement. You're going to blow the socks off your prof when you start to get better grades after you cover the material.

there, there, it'll be OK.

That's easy, just remember anglo = good/right/best, and french = bad/wrong/worst. :D

You forgot "smelly." :)

Does this involve wrapping a coil of wire round your head and ramping up the juice, at that point pretty much anything makes sense.

if it doesn't it should, there's some interesting work on the effects of large magentic fields on the frontal lobe [Citation needed]

Juni, don't get all hung up on grades. Honor classes SUCK and you have to do community leadership bullshit (basically, you are an unpaid slave ) which is next to impossible with all the other things you've got going on. I thought things were going to be nothing but all breezy A's...then I took Logic and a grad course - yikes. Things eventually get a bit harder!

Just means you don't do it the way the Professor thinks you should do it. He/She will take the rest of the semester to tell you how he/she thinks it should be done; you ace the final and go back to doing it your way. :lol:

Don't stress too much about the grammar quiz mate. Who needs grammar anyway??? ;)

I'm 9/10th of the way towards having a degree in English and English as a Second Language and I still fuck up those things.

When it all comes down to it, as english speakers we take for granted the inate understanding we have of our language as professional people and when someone asks us to explain the rules we follow, sometimes that's a bit tough. Just get yourself a handbook and go through it. I'm sure it'll bring great clarity and you'll breeze through the next one.

grampa, of course.

Yeah, the thing is, I am good at USING grammar. Always have been. I very, very rarely make a mistake unless it's in a casual usage like a discussion board post, and even then it's more a matter of not bothering to be English Teacher Precise...on purpose. Things like sentence fragments. Or starting a sentence with Or or And, ending on a preposition. Saying "them" instead of "him or her." But I generally do it right when it counts.

I'm not a grammar nut, but I do believe you have to know how to do it right before you break the rules on purpose. Professional writers DO break the rules on purpose, for effect. The difference is, in that case, it does have a good effect instead of just making us look ignorant. At least that's the general goal!

Problem is, I can't CITE the rules. If you give me a sentence to correct, I don't know how to explain what's wrong with it, I just know how to fix it. Well, usually. Apparently I missed a few of those, too. :(

I never learned this stuff. You know back in grade school when all the kids in Sister Mary Eleanor's class were being drilled in diagramming sentences, memorizing rules about comma splices, split infinitives, dangling modifiers and transitive verbs? I had already passed the writing test and sat in the corner with my nose in a Judy Blume book. ;)

But I am working on an English degree with a concentration in professional writing, which means that soon I will have to take an editing course, and I will have to learn all of those grammar rules, proofreading marks and citations. So it is important, just frustrating.

And like Pie said, it's a matter of doing things HIS way. I happen to have a deep and abiding love of the semicolon; my teacher told us to avoid them like the plague. I like em dashes too -- wonder how he feels about those?

Oh well.

You can't teach your grammar to suck eggs

....but you can insure it suck's nuts :D

Wow. I could have written most of that. lol. Look, I taught adult literacy for two years and did a literacy support course that was basically a level 3 language course (stage before degree). It's hard. I found the technical explanations very, very difficult. I still would find it hard to explain why a sentence was right or wrong, but I rarely make errors in papers that are important, unless it's a deliberate creative act. I understand most of the important rules. More than many people. But at an instinctive level. I don't have an expert's understanding.

I am a bit pigheaded on writing. I don't do it how we're told/advised to do it. I probably should. But I don't.

[eta] I also got ticked off for using too many semi-colons *grins* by my literacy support tutor. She was probably right.

Dashes? I LOVE using dashes. It makes me feel all Dickinson-onian.