Class begins again on August 16th. That leaves me 11 weeks to replenish my bank account and attempt to enjoy some free time working on projects, especially that of Watching Machines. It is not lost on me, though, how poverty stricken I am in terms of free time or meeting the tab that comes with the cost of living in San Francisco. Sometimes I feel like I can only keep an American Dream alive through a hybrid lifestyle of responsible planning and nihilism.
I have an F grade in Data Structures, which might color my enthusiasm. I had an A during my midterm, so one may wonder how this F came to be; I attribute it to internet rage. This was my only online course.
I found myself triaging classes, and having had an A for the midterm for this class, I wasn’t worried too much about missing a few homeworks, as long as I slam dunked the tests and the final exam. I found that this sometimes caused a professor to question my commitment to their class but I was always able to address this attitude with a moment of face time. In this course, however, there was no such communication. This web silence came into play when I had to reschedule the final exam to the only viable exam period, his last available timeslot. I showed up 2 minutes late, (120 seconds!), and he wasn’t in his office. There was no final exam, no reschedule. Professor Metzler emailed me right after, ”Waiting until the last minute means you missed the opportunities. ” He assumed I was cooling my heels watching TV, or doing whatever, rather than juggling 5 classes, Watching Machines, and a part-time job when I scheduled his last time slot. That most of all, along with some not-quite-slam-dunked-lower-A-level-grade tests, and the spotty homework record, ruined that grade.
CCSF will let me take the class over and it will not effect my GPA, though it will be on my transcript, so I opted for that choice rather than shake the bureaucratic tree and have an arbitrary C grade fall out.
What burns me the most, in a caustic way, is wondering if this another example of Boy’s Flunk, or if it is an example of Boy’s-Flunk- stereotype threat, or if it even matters what I think?
- Apply nihilism.
- Get on with life.
- Repeat.
