School
Classes have started again. I’m only taking one class this semester, because that was all I felt like taking. I would have taken two if something else good was being offered. There was one M-W evening class that might have been worth taking, but I can’t take classes four evenings a week, because then I won’t be able to work enough hours. The class I’m taking is called Set Theory and Metric Spaces, with Professor Oh. I don’t really like the teacher. He’s the same one I had last semester for Algebra, which I dropped after two weeks. His lectures don’t really add anything to my understanding, and since he pretty much just lectures from the book, I decided to try a new strategy: don’t take notes, just follow along in the book while he’s teaching. So far, we’ve done Chapter 1, which was not too bad. It’s a small book with six chapters, so we’ll probably go through the whole thing this semester. Oh also assigns a lot of homework, but since he had difficulty keeping up with the grading for Algebra, he’s decided to try something new with this class. He still assigns a bunch of homework, but instead of turning it in, we post it online on the message board. And since only one group can get credit for a problem, because once it’s posted we can all read it, each person/group (I’m working by myself for now) is only required to get 1/15 or 15% (I’m not sure which) of the homework problems to have full credit for homework. So after he posts the homework assignment, we have a few days to kind of claim which problems we want to work on, and then on a specified date we can post our solutions. I haven’t started on the first homework assignment yet, but I need to, because it’s supposed to be posted tomorrow, and if I don’t post my solutions immediately, someone else who was working on the same problem will probably beat me to it. Anyway, I think this homework scheme is kind of ridiculous.
Last semester worked out okay. I ended up with As in all of my classes. Advanced Calculus was a close call, since I initially got a C on the final, but rewriting it correctly gave me back half of the points I missed, so I had enough for a 90%. Non-Euclidean geometry, on the other hand, was an easy A. The grade was just based on the tests, which I did very well on, so I ended up with a 99%. I wasn’t sure if I was going to get an A or not in Psychology. I did well on all the tests, but I did skip class many times, and there was something in the syllabus that said we lose all of our participation points if we skip more than four classes. But maybe he didn’t take attendance all the times that I was gone.