Halloween in Chemistry

So, my teacher told us that if we all dressed up (except for two people) then he would give us 5% extra points on our next exam. I wanted to dress up as a gypsy, but I didn't get some other stuff I needed in time, so I instead wore my pajamas, Winnie the Pooh sweater, put my hair in pigtails, and carried around Therapy Bear.

I really wished I had gotten around to putting a good costume together. Everyone who showed up today in chemsitry was dressed up. We had two missionaries, Cookie Monster, Donald Duck, a hippie, a mad Surgeon, and one of the students dressed up as my teacher, Ty. It was so funny, becuase he sat on the front counter, saying all the things that Ty says, and playing with the stuff on the counter. It was so funny, and Ty got a kick out of that. Ty dressed up as himself in the 70's complete with a blonde wig. It was great fun! And then, just because I have to mention it (I apologize because it is crude) a guy walked in wearing a box that said "Mammogram" and "Place here" under two circles. As crude and unnecessary as that was, it was worth a chuckle. We also got candy. It was great fun.

I likes Halloween! Happy Halloween!!

Pic of the Week

It'll probably now become pick of the month, becuase not only do I never visit my own blog but my computer freezes up when it's changing the picture. So, all of you who are bored with a sleeping kitty, tough. She's going to be there until I get around to change the picture.

So. . . er, that's about all I wanted to say. . . .Now I'm just rambling to ramble because rambling's so much fun. . . .

Book update because I can do it:
Finished The Dark is Rising, and am now reading Greenwitch (very interesting)
Finished Evolution and Mormonism, but I still have to finish outlining the chapters. Still, hooray! I would have enjoyed it much more if I didn't have to do stupid outlines. Still, it was an interesting read. . .I'll have to reread it when I have time, and just for fun.

Now, I have to start reading a collection of short stories for my final assignment in English. :P As interesting as it may be, I just want to read whatever I want to read.

*sniff* I just want to write my story!

Back to the Happy Past

Yesterday, being our Harvest Break recess, Mandi and I went to the elementary school to help Mom out with the book fair. Not only did we have fun in the book fair, but we bought the school cafeteria food and ate it with Stephanie and some of her other classmates. Then Nate and his friends came and sat down with us. We then went out to recess where we played on the jungle gym and teased Nate. Oh, we also played hopscotch. It was so much fun! I miss recess. And, the food was really good. Mandi and I concluded that the school takes care of you when you're cute and little, but once you become annoying and bigger they stop feeding you slop.

All the same, it was a lovely way to spend a break. And, I got a book too! The Lightening Theif, along with two bookmarks. One has this demonic worm on it that says book maggot, and the other says "Don't Judge a Book by its Movie" Lol. They make me happy. Well, off to do somemore homework that I didn't do over the break (only because I couldn't. It wasn't until last night that I got the assignment! You know, some teachers procrastinate just as bad as us students).

Tally Ho! The Defective Minion

Blah!

I may have ranted on this before, but I can't remember and I need to rant a little more on it now.

So, my lab teacher decided to be like all the other lab teachers and do a quiz on the lab that we are doing that day instead of last week's lab. WELL, before I was doing well, becuase I actually understood what was going on in the lab, and the questions at the end of each lab helped me to further understand why we did what we did in lab. As such, I did good on the quizzes. Now, I got back my last quiz, the one that we took on the lab-to-do-that-day, and I didn't do that great. I got the score (in the B-range) that I usually got on my quizzes in Basic chemistry, and I deserved those because I didn't even understand the material before or after the lab.

This is frustrating to me, becuase if the quizzes are set up as they currently are to make sure that each person does their reading, it's very pointless!!! You cannot carry out ANY of the experiments unless you have done the required reading before! It is a must! And I do the reading, but I am not a textbook reader. I do the reading, but I don't necessarily understand all of it. My understanding comes from the teacher explaining it in human terms (the textbooks use something else, whatever that is!) and then me doing the problems, or carrying out the experiment. I mean, if we, as new Organic chemistry students, are going to learn something new, shouldn't the quiz come after? In all of my other classes, quizzes were given AFTER you learned the stuff that the teacher showed/taught you.

I guess I'm just grumpy becuase I'm actually doing well in this class (instead of scraping for an A) and now this stupid set up is going to make it seem like I'm not as good as I really am. That's silly, I know, because I KNOW I'm doing good. I'm understanding everything we do in lab and class, and the points I miss are only because I missed one or two minor details. Does it even make sense to quiz people on something they don't really understand?

Okay, okay. Maybe I'm blowing it out of proportion. After all, that last quiz was set up so that it dealt with what the book says. But still! I'm doing good! I wouldn't be as annoyed with this current set-up if the quizzes weren't worth as much as the labs!!! Not to mention, doing the quizzes after showed to me that I understood it, and when we took our first exam I was confident in it. I walked out of there feeling good about it. Because I was able to do the quizzes, I was able to do the test.

Okay, I think I'm done. Thank you for listening.

A Pleasant Surprise

Finally, after thinking about it for weeks, I went to the library to write more of my story. As I was writing, flipping back and forth in my notebook to make sure I wasn't forgetting any minor details (a really sad thing for me to do because I haven't been writing), I got to a page that had a little note written in the margin:

"Look how far you are now!--Love, Debbie."

So, thanks, Debbie! That made me really happy. And so you know, I got three more pages written, but a whole lot of other things figured out, and a couple notes of parts I need to fix when I get around to typing it. Thanks a bunch!

And, yep, the library is a good place to write. I'm really going to try to do it more often.
Content and happy, Jekka G. Senoj