Grrr, I'm not in school any more

[jennickels]

I was just checking my email and saw one from Meagan's history teacher.  He sends them out weekly to remind us that he's sending grades home with the kids.  It came on Thursday (last day of school this week).  The title was about the grades so I almost didn't open it but I'm glad I did because the 2nd part of the email was to remind us that the kids have a HUGE Egyptian project due on the 15th.

Um, Meagan hasn't done anything for this project.  I completely forgot about it because she showed me the paper a week after she got the assignment when I was really depressed and just didn't care about anything.  Now she has no idea where this paper is because she figured it should be MY responsibility to keep track of it and make her do the project.  So now she has 3 days to write a paper and build a pyramid or something (we actually have a LEGO game that is shaped like a pyramid so she could just take that in and write the paper) but she doesn't know the details since she doesn't have the paper.

I've just spent 20 minutes looking for the paper while Meagan pouted in a chair.  I'm done with this crap.  I finished school already.  I don't want to write history papers and build pyramids. 

If I hadn't seen the email she would have "forgot" all weekend then come home all upset on Monday and blame me for not having it done on Tuesday and expected me to do it all for her (or, as she calls it, help her).  On top of that she invited a friend over for the night instead of working on this project.  She's had a full 2 weeks to do it. Ugh.

Now she's throwing a huge tantrum over it and demanding to know why she has to learn about Egypt.  I looked in her bag and it's a mess.  I found two papers she was supposed to give me and a study guide that was marked "incomplete".  The rest was such a mess I have no idea how she finds anything.

I just don't have the energy to deal with this crap.

Comments

[jennickels.livejournal.com]

I think she's worried she'll be like the only 6th grader in a class full of like 8th grade boys or something, lol. I'm pretty sure the class would be a lot more mixed with mostly 6th and 7th graders.

She is one of the youngest kids in the school, though, so I guess I can see that being an issue. She has a late June birthday so whereas her two best friends are 12 (well, one is turning 12 on Thanksgiving) she won't turn 12 until the school year is over.

But she is very mature for her age for the most part. One of her other friends is 13. She's also got a summer birthday so she's in 8th grade but just turned 13 this summer. BUT she's as tall as I am. Actually she might be taller than me. The two of them together is just hilarious. Meagan is the size of an 8-9 year old at 11 and Bailey is the size of a full grown adult (and looks like she is at least 16) at 13. She's a full foot taller than Meagan but they get along great. Bailey reminds me of me when I was that age. She gets along great with the younger kids and likes to hang out with Brenna, too. They just sit there and chat and she adores Jack. I'm thinking of asking her to babysit him so we can go out alone for a lunch or something. Of course the other kids would be there but she'd be one more set of eyes and ears on him. We actually left the kids and her at home for like 20 minutes while we ran to the store one night and when we got back she had organized the kids to clean up the kitchen and the house was all straightened up. And Jack was still alive, lol. I wished I had some change that day to give her because she did a good job.

Anyway... math... I just didn't get geometry. Well, I got it but the teacher I had was a stickler for the proofs and showing ALL your work. Too bad I did half of it in my head and would forget to write it down since, well, I did it in my head so why write it. I ended up getting a C in the class because of incomplete proofs even though I got the correct answer which ticked me off.

Then the week we started trig junior year I was out sick. I didn't know we were skipping ahead to the end of the book because the ACTs were coming up and we needed to know trig for them. So I missed almost the entire lesson and had to learn it from a book (I was never good at asking for help with anything and by then I was so far past what my parents knew about math--my mom stopped helping me in like 4th grade and my dad couldn't help after 6th grade). I never really got it so pre-calc senior year was torture, lol. The only upside was two of my best friends were in the class (which was mixed juniors/seniors) and we had lunch together right after. I passed the class with a B but the stuff never really stuck with me and I had to take the same basic class over in college and still didn't get it.

But that might have been because I was too busy playing footsie with my boyfriend during class to pay attention.

I owe my love of algebra to the great teacher I had in 7th grade. She told us to forget the book. We only looked at it for the problems but we NEVER looked at the explanations for the lessons. She said they made no sense and there were easier ways of learning it, ways her professor taught her in college. She said before that she would have never thought to become a math teacher and then she had that great professor and it all just clicked. She taught us the way she learned and it all just made perfect sense to me.

I always explain Algebra as being a big logic puzzle. My brain likes logic puzzles with logical solutions that are usually easy to figure out if you know the rules. I can't wait for Meagan to get to algebra. I'll have to relearn it all but I'm sure I'll have fun doing the problems along with her.

[thothmes.livejournal.com]

I scored in the 98th percentile for spatial relations. I just came understanding geometry intuitively. I can't really take any credit for doing well in that class, it's more a case of being able to just see it, and the real scandal would be if I managed to do badly in it, given the brain I came with.

Whenever we were tested for aptitudes, the results always came back saying I should consider becoming an architect. I can imagine no job to which I would be less suited, although I would have a real talent for the spatial part of it, the other parts of the job would drive me nuts, since part of it entails keeping track of many small details. Not a good thing for the sort of person whose issues with algebra included losing track of the odd negative sign. I'm much more of a big picture than a picky detail sort of person.

Oooh, Bailey sounds wonderful, and a good babysitter is worth her weight in gold!

[jennickels.livejournal.com]

I always scored high in everything on those tests. Up until the end of high school I was just a good test taker. Around 11th grade I think I just got tired of tests and bubbles and #2 pencils, lol. My test scores started to go down and I even froze up during a make-up math test and only finished half of it. I just apologized to the teacher and was like, "I don't know what happened," She told me it happens to the best of us, lol.

I like logic puzzles. I used to buy magazines with them just for fun. But I also used to love to draw (not that I was ever really good at it but I enjoyed it) and I obviously have the creativity down with my writing. I SUCK at technical writing and hated doing research papers in school but give me a creative writing assignment and I would rock it.

[thothmes.livejournal.com]

Oh, I always scored high on everything on those tests too, except for one test: Clerical Speed and Accuracy. They tested it by giving us an already filled out bubble-test type sheet, and handed us an empty sheet, and told us to copy it.

I scored in the 40th percentile.

I always worked hard at school, because that is what one did, I suppose, and always did well. My dad's best advice to me was when he dropped me off at college, he told me that he knew how hard I worked to get there, and that he was incredibly proud of that, but that if I only did that here, I would be missing a large part of what this experience was about. I relaxed a bit after that, and became a bit more human.

My mother graduated first in her class from the same college I did a mere 18 years before me. We had many of the same teachers and textbooks. She was a Greek major and took Greek 001 and Greek 101 co-terminally! So imagine my shame when I got strep throat, and as a result of only being able to get good sleep in the morning when my fever was down, I missed quite a few Greek 001 classes. I came back just before the midterm, and crammed all night to study for the exam.

It was a disaster. I went into the exam, and every fact I'd worked to memorize just vanished out of my head, I was so tired and stressed. When I got the exam back, it was my first-ever-in-a-lifetime failure. And it was a doozy. On the top of the page in bright red pen was an "F - -" When I fail, apparently I FAIL. I sat down with my prof after that, and she worked with me, and I pulled the grade up to a 2.7 for the semester. I went sheepishly to my mother with this bit of information, and she pointed out that, yes, same class, same classroom, same text book, different prof. My prof, a notoriously tough grader, and a long-standing family friend (my grandfather taught there before he retired, my grandmother was Admissions Director for many years, and my aunt and my dad grew up on campus), had been on sabbatical the year my mom took it. Still, she did it with baby me to take care of, while I only had myself to organize.

[jennickels.livejournal.com]

OK, that test would have killed me. I'm sure I would have gone cross-eyed trying to fill in bubbles.

I was one of those kids (like Meagan) that breezed by in school doing minimal work. I wasn't a straight A student because I just didn't care to be. I knew even back then that stress and me don't mix and I wasn't about to jeopardize my health stressing over tests in high school that really didn't mean much in the end when I could just get a B without really studying and worrying. But I knew when I needed to study and when I could just glance over some notes to refresh my memory before a test.

My friends in high school were mostly classic over achievers, top of the class. I hung out with some really smart people. My one friend missed Valedictorian by just a few grade points which she attributed to some health problems she had one year (she passed out in the bathroom and smacked her head on the sink so they had to call and ambulance--I was out sick that week, she was seriously anemic). Most of my friends were in the top 3% of our class, National Honor Society, straight As, taking AP classes.

I think I graduated with a 3.3 GPA and ranked like 130something our of 408. That was good enough for me. I carried that attitude over to college. My grades were good enough but that dang Spanish score kept pulling my GPA down so by the time I quit I only had a 2.8. Shrug. I had finished my last semester of Spanish, though, so I probably could have pulled that up over the next 2 years. It was just too much stress for me, though. It came down to working enough hours to pay my rent or staying in school and possibly living in the library. I chose to work full time and quit school.

Well, I had planned to transfer at first (to Southern Illinois University which I was accepted into) but then decided the only reason I was even in college was because my parents expected it and I wasn't really getting anything out of it. I was just there and bored and not interested in school any more. That was 1997 and by 1999 I was engaged, pregnant and planning a wedding.

I also had no support system back then. My parents were 350 miles away and neither had gone to college (my dad tried community college after Vietnam but couldn't get into it and my mom never graduated high school), I didn't have any close friends at school (except my boyfriend which I won't get into--tool) and there was no internet back then.

Well there was but it was dial-up and I couldn't afford it, lol. I was so completely isolated and on my own it wasn't even funny.

[thothmes.livejournal.com]

The Valedictorian and Salutatorian in my class achieved their status because classes weren't weighted ( at the high school here, honors classes add points, as do some other classes considered above average in difficulty or amount of work), and they didn't take risks. Our senior year they took only 2 or 3 classes, so they could be sure to get all A's and keep that top spot. I had a full eight classes all four years plus some independent study. I graduated 13th out of a class of either 233 or 244 (one was my high school class, the other my college class, and I can never remember which was the larger of the two).

Needless to say, back in the mid 70's when women's lib was just beginning to take root, I was too frighteningly bright to get any attention from the boys. I am well acquainted with the tones that Regency bucks must have used when they talked about bluestockings.

Fortunately, my college self-selected for frighteningly bright women and my husband's did the same for men. We found each other there. Besides, by then I'd been the recipient of my father's good advice, and scaled back on the academic overdrive a bit. Basically, I got a life.

My mother went to college, met my dad as a freshman (he was a junior), married him, had a little me 11 months later, and then went back and got her degree from our alma mater when I was 4. I saw how hard it was for her to do that, so I refused to get married until I had that A.B. degree in hand. I'm 3 credits and a Masters Thesis short of an M.A. in Classical Art and Archaology.

My grandfather the college prof. was so disappointed that neither my mother, my father, or I ever got the PhD. My mom never finished her PhD dissertation because she had too much to do with taking care of her 4 kids, and my dad got an M.A. in Creative Writing, and that was all he needed for a career as a Creative Writing professor.

[jennickels.livejournal.com]

I think we came very close to having a tie for Valedictorian my senior year. But we were an academically minded all girls school full of over achievers. That was the norm.

In the Catholic school system in Chicago there are certain schools that are known for sports and those that are known for academics. Ours was kind of both when I went there (we had star volleyball and basketball programs the 4 years I was there) but if you asked around anyone would tell you that my school was for the smart kids or it was "too hard" and no one wanted to go there or they thought it was too hard to get in (we had to take entrance exams and score high enough).

That was in the early-mid 90s (graduated in 95). I only ever applied to one college. I knew where I wanted to go, studied their entrance requirements which I more than qualified for and was confident I would get in. And I did. I took mostly easy classes my first two years, just pre-reqs I needed for later courses although I squeezed creative writing in there (which was a 300 level course that I took the 2nd semester of my freshman year). But I took as many credits as I could the 2nd summer because I was living off campus and paying rent so I might as well do something (I wasn't working and my dad picked up my $165/month rent, electric and cable bills for the 2 months).

With my summer work I was slated to graduate a semester early. I had it worked out that if I took the regular amount of credits both semesters that year and full courseload the next summer I would have graduated in December 98 instead of May 99 but the last semester I would have only had to take like one or two classes because I'd only need a few credits. Of course that was if I could get all the classes I needed which never happened, lol. I would have had my BA in English.

I was going to major in Linguistics when I was going to go to SIU and either minor in creative writing or anthropology. Those were the only things that really interested me but the stress...just wasn't worth it.

[cschick.livejournal.com]

But we were an academically minded all girls school full of over achievers. That was the norm.

And so was a great amount of academic dishonesty in the top 3% of our class.

[jennickels.livejournal.com]

I'm sure there was. Wasn't me, though. I don't remember cheating because I really didn't care.

I do remember trying to get out of doing service every year by making up anything I could think of. My mom didn't care so she always signed the sheet that said I did my service hours.

I never did them. Maybe 3 hours the entire time I was there (I actually enjoyed standing on the corner of 63rd & Cicero to hand out suckers for Misericordia).

[cschick.livejournal.com]

I was just kind of giggling at some of your above, because I remember some of the other stuff going down with a subset of those in the say, top 15 of our class. Like one of them had her sister, a graduate student at U of I write every single English paper she turned in for four years, and she had the entire English staff completely convinced she was the second coming. Or the two who took the exact same set of classes for all 4 years, so they could divide the work load in half and spend the rest of the time drinking/getting high.

I don' t know whether anyone in our group of friends participated in any of it (none of the three mentioned above were in our group of friends) ... I do know I was kind of considered the uptight straight arrow and thus I kind of just watched all the nonsense but was never approached to participate in any of it. The only way it ever affected me was when I was grilled by several members of the administrative staff/college counseling staff during late senior year because they didn't understand how someone who was "only" 25th in the class was testing so well. It's always wonderful to have a member of your school staff tell you that you don't deserve to be a national merit scholar ;)

[jennickels.livejournal.com]

OMG, they said that?

I never really suspected any of our group. I just figured they were all typical overachievers. I always felt I got some odd looks because I never studied and still maintained my As and Bs so I wasn't well liked over that, lol.

I always worried about you, though. You were way too stressed out in school. I'm pretty sure I told you a couple times to just chill out.

But, then again, I wasn't a merit scholar and didn't care to be one. I was happy with my slightly above average grades. I definitely felt out of place a lot of the time because I wasn't in the top 10% but, eh, it means nothing now.

There was a lot of pressure at the school to succeed and I'm sure parents really pushed a lot of the girls to do whatever they had to do to get top grades. My parents weren't like that.

Of course, I always like to point out to people who think private school is so much better than public school that all the same crap was going on at our school. The drinking, drugs, cheating, teenage sex, partying, fighting, etc.

That wasn't me either. I was so freaking boring in high school. I never went to a single party, drank, smoked or did any of that teen stuff. One of my best friends went to Peace (she was 4 years behind us, though) and she told me her parents never knew about all the while parties she went to, coming home hung over and pretending to have the flu. She ended up pregnant her senior year. And she was the top of her class, all AP classes and stuff.

She's now a teacher (at a public school) and is terrified of becoming a grandmother at 34, lol. Her daughter is 12 now and a good kid. But so was she at that age.

[thothmes.livejournal.com]

My degree was in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology. It makes me really good at researching things in libraries, noting stylistic evolution and differences, evaluating evidence, and structuring cogent arguments.

It also makes employers' eyes glaze over when you tell them what you majored in! Unless you want a job at a museum (for which I'd be underqualified without a PhD), there are precious few employers who are looking for that sort of degree!

I wanted to be an Egyptologist, but I got into the two best places to study that as a grad student (University of Chicago and University of Toronto), and my husband was waiting listed at Northwestern and Toronto. Toronto takes 9 med students out of province let alone out of country, so we went off to University of Michigan, the only med school outside of Texas (where he went to high school) that he got in. Michigan had no Egyptology, so I did Classical Art and Archaeology there. Texas had good Archaeology at UT Austin, including underwater archaeology, but at the time they had no med school there.

The icon isn't expressing an opinion. It's just Egyptian. It's Bes, a friendly little god who looked over household concerns and warned away evil.