On August 18, 1997, I began my first semester at the local community college. I was a "part time" student, taking nine units instead of the usual 12 to 15 (this was in addition to working 5 hours a week in a store and being involved in my family's business). Those classes were Economics, American Literature, and Media In America. Here is a day-to-day account of what college is like for an unschooler.

August 27, 1997

Here I am, halfway into my second week of school, and so far I'm enjoying myself. Indeed, I'm mainly going to college for that reason. I've quickly learned that it's not the usual reason; even the teachers don't expect their students to enjoy learning. One said that our presence in her classroom proved our belief in the American Dream: why would we be there other than in the hope that getting an education would help us make more money? Another teacher once asked me (outside of class) why I was going to college. I said, "It's something interesting to do." He gave me such a look! A rather approving look, I'd say, but one that said he'd never heard of such an odd thing.

I made sure to choose teachers I liked. All these years of having my wonderful mother as a teacher have made me finicky. I know the American Lit professor from spring, when I took a class from her for high-school credit. I met others by sitting in on classes and visiting their offices. There are some wonderful instructors here and also some real pills.

I love the Economics book I'm reading now! It's The Worldly Philosophers, by Robert Heilbroner. It's difficult because of all the complex ideas it covers, but I don't mind that. The ideas are fascinating, and the writing is quite lively. I've talked to three or four of my classmates about it, but none of them like the book. They were also only 20 to 50 pages into it when the assignment was to read half the book. But how could they be expected to keep up with all of their reading when (1) they hate it, and (2) they're taking three or four other classes that are assigning just as much reading that they find equally detestable? Even this so-called "part time" schedule keeps me mighty busy with books.

August 29, 1997

I have to be careful in my Media class. I'm very interested in the issues we discuss, and when the instructor asks for comments, I always think of one immediately. I'm trying to remember to wait a while to see if someone else wants to talk.

I found what seems to be a glaring contradiction in one of the economic theories described in Worldly Philosophers. It's bugging me enough that I'm going to stop by the teacher's office and ask him about it.

I've decided to read an extra book for Media, for extra credit. I asked the teacher, and he says it's fine. The book is James Fallows' Breaking the News. I read the first two chapters last year, got busy and returned it to the library, and have been meaning ever since to finish it sometime. I was thinking of reading Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations as an extra book for Economics, but I've reluctantly thought better of it: it's just too big. I'm never going to get through two thick volumes by the end of the semester if I want to spend any time on anything but books. Maybe I'll read it in the summer.

September 3, 1997

The Media teacher didn't show up for class today. At about 10 past starting time, people got to debating whether the rule was that they could leave if the teacher was 10 minutes late, or whether it was 15 minutes. Most thought it was 15. One started a sign-in sheet to leave in his in-box, "to show that we're responsible even if he's not." I suggested that since she was going to the faculty building with the sign-in sheet, she check his office to see if he just lost track of the time. She gave me a funny look and said sonething like, "Nah, that's not our responsibility." At exactly 15 past, the whole class packed up and scrammed.

I offered to take the sign-in sheet, and I went to the teacher's office with it. He had just lost track of the time. So we could have had class if one of us had just run over to the next building to say, "Hey, you're late." I think I'm the only one who regrets not doing so, though. I always enjoy class discussions and lectures. It was strange to see the rest of the class so eager to clear out as soon as they could do so without getting in trouble.

If the teacher had been truly absent, I would have enjoyed having class even without him. Why can't the rest of us have an educational and thought-provoking discusion on our own? Certainly we could talk about the assigned reading; we know as much about the book as the instructor does. I wonder if anyone else would have been interested in doing that. Probably not, unless it would have affected their grades.

I didn't completely miss out on media discussion today: when I stopped at the teacher's office, we talked about the press's involvement in Princess Diana's death and got into a debate over whether we could and should make laws to limit the paparazzi. I think it should be illegal to harrass people as they do. I don't see it as a "freedom of the press" issue. If someone other than a reporter followed you around everywhere you went, taking your picture and asking who you've slept with, wouldn't you call the police? Don't you think the police would do something about it? Letting the press act that way gives them special priveleges at the expense of the people they harass. That's my take on the issue, anyhow. My teacher thinks that (1) they have a constitutionally guaranteed right to treat people like that, and that (2)if laws to stop them were passed and upheld in court, the long-term effects would be bad since such laws interfere with the free press.

September 4, 1997

Media In America was lively today. We were discussing Princess Diana, and hands were up all over the room. It was fun.

I love Anne Bradstreet's poem "An Author to Her Book." It was part of our latest American Lit assignment. All of the assignments for that class have been interesting, but this is the first one that moved me simply as a piece of beautiful writing. The others (excerpts from Captain John Smith's books on the new world, for example) have been interesting as history. I'm getting history straight from the horse's mouth instead of from some lousy textbook.

Speaking of lousy textbooks, I'm going to be using one for Economics for the rest of the semester. I miss The Worldly Philosophers! This textbook--like most textbooks--is badly written and insulting. For example:

"To show how broad the concept of opportunity cost is, suppose that Bob and Dan both love Liz. Liz reciprocates both Bob and Dan's love. Unfortunately, Bob threatens to find someone new if Liz does not quit seeing Dan. Soap opera fans might commiserate with Liz's dilemma, but economists view the real cost to Liz of a continued relationship with Bob as giving up Dan, and vice versa."

We have a good book for Media: Wizards of Media Oz, by Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen. It's not a textbook. It focuses on the media's being a profit-driven industry, and it takes close looks at some issues that don't usually get the coverage they deserve. I recommend it.

September 10, 1997

We had a long, noisy debate in Economics today: Are businesses are justified in shipping jobs overseas to "stay competitive"? Do they owe their employees a decent wage? Is the founder of a successful business more valuable than the employees who labor for that business?

On Monday, I went to my American Lit professor's office to discuss some of my summer reading. I had been reading Edith Wharton and William Faulkner, authors she had introduced me to (in the class I took from her in spring). We both enjoy trading interpretations of books.

Yesterday, I stopped to talk to the teacher I took a composition class from last fall. He's still trying to convince me that I should be at a university, but I like it here at the community college. I'll probably transfer somewhere else eventually, to take classes that aren't offered here.

September 19, 1997

I just finished my first midterm. It was for Economics, and it took up Wednesday's class and today's (Friday's) class. Each day, I had a choice of two essay questions and 50 minutes to write my answer. It's frustrating to have so little time in which to write. The question I chose today was, "Explain Adam Smith's theory of Capitalism. How well does it describe the 'market' system today? How has our system dealt with the inequalities and failures of Smith's capitalism? What 'reforms' would you make in the market system today and why?" All of that in 50 minutes? I didn't have time to do more than spit out the facts I already knew and the thoughts that had already occurred to me.

Had I been assigned to write a take-home essay on that question, I would have researched and thought about it. I would have learned from writing that essay. But exams aren't about learning; they're only about proving what one has already learned so that the teacher knows what mark to put on one's transcript. What a waste of time!

Oh well. At least I managed to do a fairly good job of spitting back evidence of my newly-acquired knowledge. "Evidence of my newly-acquired knowledge"--that's the sort of wording my Economics teacher would approve of. So I filled my essays with phrases such as enabling them to increase their productive capacity and a generous handful of whereases and heretofores. I had to hold my nose to do it. Pretentious writers drive me nuts.

I've been thinking that after a year or two at this college, I might like to study in another country for a while.

September 22, 1997 I got a high "B" on the Economics midterm (45/50 on one question and 41/50 on the other). I'm content with the grade. I'm not content with having my essays returned without a single mark on either except for the numbers. Since I didn't get 100%, I know the teacher found flaws. What were they??? Not that I can't read the papers myself and find plenty of things I would have done differently. I would still like the teacher's reaction for two reasons. 1: he knows more about economics than I do and could point out errors I wouldn't recognize. 2: since he is judging my writing, I'd like to know what standards he judges it by.

I might go to his office and ask whether he'll go over my essays with me.

No American Lit today: the teacher has been sent out of town to demonstrate report-writing at other schools. I hate missing that class. The reading assignments continue as usual, but we can't discuss them.

September 29, 1997

The American Lit teacher returned some papers today (charts of what Franklin, Crevecoeur, and others think of American society and the ideal American). With margin notes!!! Thank goodness.

I did ask the Economics teacher if he'd go over my essay with me. "Why don't I just give you one of the better essays to read?" he said, and handed me someone's "A" essay to keep until the next day. It wasn't very helpful.

The Media teacher has twice forgotten to show up for class. He has told us that if he does it again, one of us should check for him in his office. Well, before class today, I was chatting with the person on my left when I heard the person on my right make a remark about his being late again. I looked at the clock: it was 7 minutes past (according to the school's rules, class is cancelled if the teacher is over 10 minutes late). Startled, I said, "I'll go get him," and jumped up. I was halfway to the door when I realized that people were telling me not to go, and someone called out, "You won't make any friends!"

So there's the nagging little doubt that will bug me for the next day or so: should I have just sat and waited? (In this case, it didn't matter: while I was knocking on his door, the teacher was calling the office to say he wasn't coming in today.) If the situation comes up again, what should I do? My going to find the teacher was purely selfish: I enjoy my classes and am quite ticked off when one is cancelled. Was it wrong to have tried to inflict that on all the people who would've loved a day off? And is not missing class worth making my fellow students resent me?

October 6, 1997

I had a midterm for American Literature today. It was fairly easy because the teacher had given us plenty of hints about the exam questions and let us bring a sheet of notes. It's amazing how much one can fit on one piece of paper with a fine-point pen and lots of abbreviations. The teacher said she was letting us bring notes because she wanted us to do the studying that we'd have to do to write good notes. I like that attitude. It's true that I did quite a bit of learning and thinking when I prepared them.

The only problem for me was that I was learning and thinking about things that I wasn't very interested in. This class hasn't turned out to be quite what I was looking for. I had expected an "American Literature" class to focus on reading the best of American writing (what the teacher thought best, anyhow, and I often share this teacher's tastes), understanding it, and appreciating it. Instead, this class has focused on studying the development of American literature. We've read a number of things that even the teacher thinks are garbage. The midterm questions were on things such as the influence of Calvinism on early American writing. It's moderately interesting to me, but I don't think I'll take another class like this.

After class, I had an appointment with the Literature teacher to discuss "A Rose for Emily." That's a William Faulkner short story, which is completely unrelated to this class (this is American Lit 1; Faulkner's not covered till American Lit 2). But since we both love Faulkner, the teahcer had recommended that story to me and asked me to let her know what I thought of it. I was glad to do so. I love to discuss books, and she has such interesting things to say about them. Besides, I'm always glad for an excuse to talk to my teachers outside of class, just because I like to get to know them.

October 10, 1997

The Media teacher has given a wonderful assignment. We've just finished reading Wizards of Media Oz, a collection of essays on widely varying topics. The assignment? Choose any one of those topics and write an 3- to 5-page research paper on it. I've chosen my favorite TV show, NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. I admit that it's not an ambitious choice. I could've written on U.S. policies in South America, for example, or the media's role in the affirmative action debate, or whether the CIA was involved in drug smuggling for the Nicaraguan contras. Were I only taking this one class, I might well have chosen one of those. As busy as I am, I don't feel I could do justice to such a subject. If I tried, I'd probably end up handing in something I felt was underresearched and full of holes. I'd rather do a thorough job on a simpler topic.

Though this is the first major assignment for Media, there have been quite a few minor ones: brief summaries of the reading assignments. Each was supposedly due by the next class, and I always handed mine in on time. And the teacher always extended the deadline. And extended it. And extended it. As things now stand, one can hand all of them (about 2 weeks worth of assignments) in on Monday without a lateness penalty. I won't be a bit surprised if, on Monday, the teacher says we have until Wednesday. It's annoying to me. I feel that I should get credit for doing my assignments on time; instead, I'm hearing that I might as well have procrastinated for over two weeks.

Not that I wish I had done so. If I hadn't kept up with the assignments, I'd be going crazy right now with trying to finish them and write a research paper. I fell behind on my Economics book (by about 2/3 of a chapter) while studying for the Lit midterm, and catching up on that will be hard enough while I'm busy writing about the NewsHour and doing my usual reading for American Lit.

That Economics book, by the way, is still driving me up the wall. Once, it spent two pages on an elaborate, confusing example of the Money Multiplier at work. So? Well, they could've made the exact same point much more clearly with one short paragraph of simple arithmetic.

In American Lit on Wednesday, I said Edgar Allen Poe reminded me of Dr. Seuss. I read a bit from Seuss's Oh, the Places You'll Go!

"On you will go
though the weather be foul.
On you will go
though your enemies prowl.
On you will go
though the Hakken-Kraks howl.
Onward up many
a frightening creek..."

After I read that, the teacher (who had been skeptical at first) saw exactly what I meant.

October 13, 1997

I ran across blatant racism for the first time the other day. Between classes, I was talking to a girl from Economics. A friend of hers came up and joined the conversation. (All three of us are white.) When the friend mentioned that she can't stand a nearby town, I asked why. She said, "Well, I'm not a racist or anything, but there are a lot of black people there. It's n*****-town. And they're mean!"

I'd never heard anyone talk that way except on TV. Now, some people would say I've had an overly sheltered life. I agree that it has been sheltered, but is that a bad thing? I'm sure I would have heard plenty of racist talk in public school. Would it have been as easy then to see it as nonsense? Or would hearing it from little on have made me wonder if there was something to it? I don't suppose I could have become a racist, regardless; my parents are too strongly opposed to racism and would have managed to teach me what was right. Still, I feel it was best for me to grow up in the atmosphere in which I did.

For fifty cents at the library's discard table, I bought another book by Robert Heilbroner (author of The Worldly Philosophers, the first book I read for Economics). It's called Marxism: For and Against. I still plan on reading The Wealth of Nations next summer, and perhaps Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class. I wish I had time for them now.

We had a pretty lively discussion in Economics today, covering such topics as marrying for money and finding work because one knows someone. It was one of those rare discussions that involved more than the usual 5 participants. The teacher often asks for comments and questions. Usually, he gets comments from me, the very conservative guy who sits next to me (in the front row), the girl behind us, another girl to her right, and a 50-ish man at the left end of the front row. Questions are from me (usually one or two per class) and a 40-ish woman in the middle of the room. This is out of a class of about 30 people. It's funny that more folks don't have more to say and ask.

October 17, 1997

I went to the Economics teacher's office today to ask him to explain some things from the textbook. He is usually unenthusiastic about talking to students outside of class (which bugs me), but today we actually had a bit of a conversation about something he'd talked about in class the other day. I have gotten the impression that he's not particularly interested in his students until they prove to him that they are worth his notice. While I resent that, it might be worth my while to try to get his attention, for I'm very interested, not only in the facts he knows (which I could learn elsewhere), but in the things he has to say about them.

One other note about the Economics teacher: his lectures are wonderful. Anyone who thinks Economics is dull and confusing just hasn't heard him explain it.

Since I'm writing about teachers, I'll mention something I admire about the Media professor: after many years of careful study of current events, he still gets outraged about them. It's too easy to get accustomed to the world's problems, to think, yes, such-and-such is terrible, but it's nothing new; I'm used to it. He has managed to educate himself about discouraging matters without resigning himself to them.

October 30, 1997

It has been quite a while since I've had time for the Internet, so here's a general update.

First, that paper for Media. When I did the research, I was quite enthused about the project, and I did an excellent job. When I got to the point of editing the research and actually writing an essay on it, I found I didn't have the time or energy to do my best work. So I took my excellent research and did an adequate job of assembling a paper from it. I usually enjoy writing, but I didn't enjoy this. I felt frustrated, wished I didn't have to write it at all, and was very relieved--but not the least bit satisfied--when I had typed the last sentence. I suppose most people would say I should be content since I got an "A" on the dratted thing.

I got a perfect score on the American Lit midterm.

Last week was the first time I cut a class without a proper reason. The Media teacher was talking about the evils of U.S. foreign policy. It would've been interesting except that half of what he was saying, he'd already said before, and the other half, I'd heard other places. So, halfway through, I got up and muttered, "Sorry, I have to leave early," and left. Now, I know plenty of people who cut class, but they don't usually do so in order to have time to read the Wall Street Jounal. Yes, that was what I was anxious to do. I'd never read it before, but taking this Economics class has made me want to keep up with economic news and apply what I was learning. When I heard about Hong Kong's stock market crisis, I wanted to read a better article than I'd get from the local paper. So I spent part of my free half-hour reading the WSJ, and then I went to the Economics teacher's office to ask why Hong Kong raised interest rates during a stock-market crash (it was to keep money in the country, he said).

While I was there, I also asked him about the next midterm: "I don't expect you to correct my writing or anything, but would you be willing to point out any flaws you find in my understanding of Economics? I just want to know if there's anything I'm getting wrong." [See Sept. 22 and 29 for my experience with the first Econ midterm, which prompted me to make this request.] He said that he doesn't usually take the time to correct exams because people want to get them back right away. But if I give it back to him afterwords, he'll be happy to read it again. Wonderful!

The 27th and 29th were the midterm itself. I believe I did pretty well. As before, it was essay questions, one essay each day. For the first one, I realized afterwards that I'd forgotten to answer one aspect of the question. Here it is; I the part I missed is in italics: "Describe the Federal Reserve System in terms of why it was established, its structure, whether it is private or public, and what tools it has to affect the economy. One Fed governor described his role as 'taking away the punch bowl when the party gets good.' What did he mean by this? Why do many modern monetarists favor using rules to determine the amount of punch rather than leaving the amount up to the Fed's discretion? What does the quote, 'money talks but it's not always in English' mean for the Fed?" Oops! I believe I did well on the rest of the question, so I'm not going to worry about it. I don't need to get an "A" in every class to be able to transfer.

The question I picked the second day was fairly easy. It was just a list of 18 terms to define (e.g., "Demand Pull," "Liquidity Preference," "Phillips Curve"; the only one I couldn't remember was "Milton Friedman"). The other question I could've chosen was to read and analyze an article about the U.S.'s economic outlook. I never even considered picking that one. Defining terms is so much easier for me than trying to come up with a good analysis in only 50 minutes. I love to analyze (and I believe I'm good at it), but not when I have to hurry.

November 3, 1997

I got 95% on the Econ midterm: 48/50 for the Federal Reserve question and 47/50 for the definitions. So I guess I don't need to have the teacher go over them again.

We're reading Hawthorne for American Lit, and I'm sick of him. I can't relate to his stories. Oh well, I enjoyed the last two authors, Emerson and Thoreau, very much. I liked Emerson enough that I'm interested in doing an independent study of him. I've been talking it over with the teacher from whom I took Preparatory College Writing last fall.

November 17, 1997

Well, I won't be doing that independent study mentioned above, and I'm very disappointed. It's because the teacher's a part-timer; I won't bore you with all the details of what I heard from the administration, but their provisions for independent study are quite absurd. It might be possible for me to set something up with a full-time teacher, and I might try to do that sometime. But I didn't just want to study Emerson (which I could do on my own); I wanted this particular teacher's perspective on Emerson. It would've given me so much to think about.

The Econ teacher lectured a bit about the family as an economic unit. Modern American families, he said, are not economic units, that is, children, parents, and grandparents no longer cooperate on economic matters. It occurred to me that he had perfectly summed up one thing that makes my family different from most families I know: my family is an economic unit. We work together. Officially, my dad is "self-employed," but my mom and I have always been involved in his work. "His" work? No, it is our work, without question. So it was also with the store where my mom used to work part-time (until it went out of business this fall), and where I often helped out, sometimes officially, paid by the manager, and sometimes unofficially, just because I felt a connection to the store. And so it is with the housework, the gardening, and such. These are not so-and-so's business, they are our family's business. And so, likewise, was my upbringing and education my family's business.

I believe that shared business brings families together better than shared leisure time can. When parents come home from their jobs and children from their schools, and none has had any involvement in what the others have been devoting their days to, what common ground to they have? How well can they know each other when their shared activities are always amusing ones, when they are idle together but do their work in separate worlds? How many fights over money and dishes and yardwork could families avoid if they were not divided into competing interests, so that they no longer see our money and our dishes and our yard, but squabble over what is mine and what is yours?

November 21, 1997

More on what I wrote last time:

First, I hope no one gets the idea that my parents homeschooled me so that I could provide them with free labor. That would be absolutely, unconditionally untrue. Nor have they expected an unreasonable amount of work from me. When I was little, they scarcely asked anything at all. As I got older, I gradually came to help more and more with the family's work, doing as much as was appropriate for my age.

I believe that this has been an invaluable part of my education. What could be of more benefit than learning, through example and experience, about what is involved in the running of a household and a business?

I'm not enjoying Media as much now as I did at the beginning of the semester. I think that now if the teacher forgot to show up, I'd be glad. I'm not learning anything new from his lectures except occasional isolated facts; there's not much that makes me think. The class has focused on very few aspects of the media, and I'm sick of hearing about them. I'm also sick of hearing about the evils of U.S. foreign policy and the need for campaign finance reform. I'm interested in both, but I don't need to hear the same things about them over and over. Is he trying to brainwash us? I'm disappointed because the class could be much more interesting. Still, what I am getting isn't bad in itself: I now sit in back and draw pictures (I can follow the lectures quite well while I do so), and I enjoy that quite well.

On October 13, I said it was funny that more people didn't ask questions in Econ. It makes more sense now, after getting an e-mail from a college student who went to a traditional school. She said, "I always have questions and never ask them or raise my hand to give answers. In high school when you asked questions when you didn't know something, my peers would laugh and say, "I can't believe you did not know that." So I would just keep my questions to myself."

November 26, 1997

Just one more note on my family as an economic unit: there is a way in which we'll soon become less of a unit, and a way in which we'll always be one. It won't be long before I move out and have my own career, and I'll have little involvement with their work (that is, it will then become their work, no longer our work, though I expect I'll lend a hand now and then). Yet we will still be a unit in that we know that if either I or my parents needs help, be it money or time, we can always depend on each other to help out to the best of our ability.

In Media today, we watched a documentary about breast cancer. I'm not saying it wasn't interesting and important, but what on earth does it have to do with the media? I feel that the teacher is breaking an implicit agreement when he does things of this sort. I signed up for (and paid for) this class under the impression that he was going to spend three hours a week teaching us about the media. He hasn't done so.

My new explanation of why I shall take less classes in the future: this semester, I have gone beyond the point of diminishing returns. This is the law of diminishing returns, as I heard it in Economics last week. When a business has a fixed amount of resources (e.g., land), there is a point at which, by hiring more workers, it decreases its productivity per worker. Well, there are a fixed number of days in a semester. When I take too many classes and reads too many books within that semester, I learn less from each. That is, I receive diminishing returns.

On Monday, the Econ teacher said that it's right for capital gains to be taxed at a lower rate than income, for people who buy and sell capital take risks whereas people who work for wages do not. I thought that over for a day and a half, and today I asked him (at the beginning of class) about a point that bugged me. What about entrepreneurs? They take equally great risks. I hope the rest of the class didn't mind that I kept after him about it until he understood my question and I understood his answer (it took about 5 minutes). Here is what his reply came down to: entrepreneurs do pay the lower tax rate when they sell their businesses, and the ability to sell their businesses in the future compensates them for the fact that they take more risk than those who work for others. I'm not convinced that the lower tax rate is right, but I understand his argument now.

December 8, 1997

What a stupid system. It piles on so much work that one can't possibly do one's best at all of it. Then it berates one's greater failures incessantly and calls one's lesser failures successes.

I've been feeling this for most of the semester, but it has peaked now: I'm a week from finals and have received all my end-of-semester assignment. Whatever happens to the rest, I'm going to do a good job on the paper I'm writing for American Lit. The assignment is to choose any text or combination of texts from what we've read this semester and write a 6- to 8-page literary analysis of it. I've picked Poe's short story "Ligeia." I have a--how shall I say--nontraditional interpretation of it, and I'm excited about writing it down. I did the rough draft this weekend. It's shaping up to be an excellent paper, and I'm determined to take time to make it such. If my book report for Media suffers or I don't finish Chapter 18 for Econ, so be it. Since I can't do fine work on everything, I'll at least do it on one thing.

I doubt I'll have time to make more entries here until after finals. After school is out, I'll report a few interesting incidents I haven't got around to mentioning, follow up on some earlier entries, and add some general thoughts on the semester and on college. And I'll keep you posted on semester #2!

Final Exams (written later; who has time for the Internet during finals?)

I did my best work on that "Ligeia" paper. I was and still am very pleased with it.

For Media, I had a take-home final: a book report! I can't see how a book report is a final exam, but that's what the teacher wanted to do. It wasn't even a report on a whole book. The week before finals, he handed out photocopies of three chapters of a book and told us to write a separate report on each, identifying the author's main point and summarizing how he proved it. It was incredibly easy and incredibly boring. It was supposed to be at least 3 pages long, not one line less. I used all the long, unnecessary words I could think of to stretch 2 pages' worth of writing out to cover 3 pages. I even came up with 6 extra lines. It was atrocious writing, but the teacher must've been impressed by my vocabulary because he gave me an "A." Good grief!

I didn't study for the American Lit final. The teacher's approach is to give us a pretty good idea of what will be on the exam (for example, we knew there'd be some sort of question about comparing and contrasting Emerson, Poe, and Whitman's ideas about poetry, but we didn't know the details) and to let us bring one sheet of notes. It means that your grade on the exam depends mainly on how many hours you spend going through the various texts and finding relevant points. Well, I had 13 1/2 points of extra credit for the class (3 from the midterm, and the rest from quizzes), and the exam was only 16 points (out of the 100 possible in the class). Any time I'd spent studying for the exam would've been time I wasn't studying for something else.

I didn't feel quite right about neglecting it, though, so I talked to the teacher a few days before the exam. The problem was that when I sign up for a class, I feel that I've made an agreement with the teacher: they'll do their best to teach me a subject, and I'll do my best to do the things that they ask and to learn from those things. This teacher (as opposed to the Media teacher) always stuck with her side of the agreement, so I was worried about breaking my half. She understood completely, though. She said she always sees the same agreement but didn't think I was breaking it: I was doing as much as I was able to do under the circumstances. She said to not worry about the exam and just have fun with the questions.

So I did. The exam had 3 short-answer questions and 2 essay questions. Well, I was having so much fun with the first essay question that I didn't want to rush through it and then rush through the second one, so I just did the first. It was great to have all that time to work on it. The question was to discuss the various ways in which Poe, Hawthorne, and Whitman portray evil. I'd never analyzed that before (except to memorize Hawthorne's definition of "unpardonable sin," having been warned that it would be needed for the final). Writing the essay, I thought of all sorts of things that were new to me. It was great! How often does one actually learn while taking an exam?

A week before the Econ final, the teacher made this announcement. The final exam would consist of 4 questions, of which we would have to choose two. However, anyone who wanted to do a take-home paper could substitute it for one of the questions, so they could only answer one in class or could answer two in class and let him choose the best two of the three (that is, of the two in-class and the take-home). It took me about half a second to decide I'd do the take-home and one in-class.

The take-home project was to watch a video about another country's economy (there were 4 countries to choose from) and analyze it according to concepts learned in the class, that is, point out things such as the influence of the entrepreneurial spirit, the savings rate, etc. The teacher showed one video (Mexico) in class the week before finals. I cut class that day to watch one of the other videos (China) in the media center. That way, I could keep pressing "pause" to be sure I got thorough notes and understood the whole thing. At home, I went over the notes with a fine-tooth comb, looked up some things in my notes from class, and wrote down everything I could think of in such a way that it demonstrated my understanding.

I finished it at about 6:30 the evening before the Econ final (which was my last exam; everything else was behind me already). Did I then stay up till 3:00 AM cramming for the in-class part of the test? No. Did I study until a reasonable bedtime? No. I thought, Tomorrow there will be 4 questions. I'll only have to answer one, and I'll have a full 2 hours. I reviewed some stuff in the course of writing this take-home paper. If I can't remember enough to answer one question without having done a ton of last-minute review, I deserve to flunk this test. So I took a much-needed rest and went to bed at 9:00.

For the test, I chose a list of terms to "define or identify." Out of about 20, I goofed on 2: I couldn't remember who Hanson was, and I put down the wrong answer for "proportional tax" because I got it confused with "apportioned tax." I probably would've known them if I'd reviewed all my notes, but I don't care. I still got 48/50 on the question and the same grade for the take-home one, giving me 96% on the whole exam and an "A" in the class. And for once the exam grade really proved something, for it was based on what I'd remembered along the way, not on what I'd read at 3:00 AM and would probably forget in 24 hours. My definition of "recessionary gap" (which relates to macroeconomic equilibrium) is nothing to be proud of, though. I didn't understand macroeconomic equilibrium when I read about it, didn't understand it when I took the exam, and don't understand it now. When I first read about it, I spent a few hours trying to figure it out, but I didn't have time or energy to spend any longer. No matter, says the college system: I was able to spit back enough of the book's words to get a checkmark for that bit of the test; what more could I want?

This page has grown mighty long. For concluding thoughts about this semester, relevant notes on my vacation, and a few incidents I never got around to mentioning earlier, proceed to this page.

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