<===Nerd

At one time it was hurtful when my sister would call me a nerd. She hasn’t done so since high school, but I know what I am. Now that I am older, it’s more of something to be proud of. I try to not look too much like a nerd because that’s still not that cool, but that’s just a choice in appearance and a little behavior.

What I am finding this semester is this: it is still not cool to be a nerd, but a nerd is still your best friend when you haven’t done what you were supposed to. More people talk to me right around an exam than any other time. I didn’t think I still looked like a nerd, but I think they can sense it like some creatures sense fear. They knew it before we even had grades as hard evidence. And it’s okay, so let’s move on.

I have spent more time writing private entries here than public ones. The private entries are my writing assignments for my classes. I write and save the drafts here until they are ready to be printed and need all that word processing stuff. This gives me a convenient place to work that I can pick up at any time from anywhere without carrying a disk or flash drive around. Nobody likes floppy drives anymore, but I still do. I just can’t use them everywhere anymore. So, just to be safe, I save it on another site in case this one is down when I need to finish and print before class.

First writing assignment was a ‘reflection paper’ for the General Psychology class on the psychology of television. He asked three questions that we had to answer thoughtfully, but no research outside of our textbook was required. He just wanted us to put some thought into it. It was supposed to be two to three pages, but he said we could write more if we wanted. He just didn’t want us to write more than six pages at the most. At first I didn’t think much of that until I realized that he meant six double-spaced pages. Then I got worried because I had a lot to say on that subject, and he restricted us to a 12 pt font and 1 inch margins. I was so thankful that he didn’t specify the font-face because any font other than Arial Narrow would have put my paper over six pages. With 12 pt. Arial Narrow it came out to 4.5 pages, and I printed it double-sided to make it look like only three pages. And I really had to make a lot of cuts to keep it that short and get it done in time. See? That’s a symptom of being a nerd.

I wasn’t even all that happy with what I said in the paper. I think it turned out to be more cynical than I originally intended it to be, and I had plenty of less cynical things I could have shared. I don’t have any research to back any of it up, but I guess everyone is allowed to pretend to be an expert when someone invites you to be one.

It’s definitely made me realize how much I have changed since I first started writing here on OD. I think it has helped me to ‘find my voice’ so to speak. I have gone from not having much to say about anything to having too much to say about everything. It has been great practice for my writing skills. I thought about that when my Ethics professor encouraged us to keep a daily journal to keep our writing skills up.

So these length restrictions used to be so hard to meet but for the opposite reason. I was the one stretching it out to the minimum length it had to be and often not even the minimum. Now I am finding that it is a greater challenge to keep it concise. As with learning how express all that I have to say, practicing here has helped with sticking to the point too. I was able to practice making clear, concise arguments early on when the entry lengths were shorter while I was still working through all of my pent up opinions.

This past week, as part of my mid-term exam for Ethics, I had to write a very brief essay on whether or not I agreed or disagreed with bombing Iraq and which ethical system supported my position. Would you believe I kept it to one double-spaced page in a 10 pt font? I like that he requires a smaller font than my Psychology professor. I will find out how well I did on that next week.

Last week I got the results of my first exam in General Psych as well as that five page reflection paper back. The exam was 50 multiple-choice questions, but they weren’t easy unless you really knew the material. He threw in a close answer on every question to make sure of that. He warned us before the exam that he is known for making multiple-choice harder than we have come to expect. Most of us have learned strategies for exams like that, but most only help when most of the answer choices are weak.

Now, no one in my class knows this, but I only answered one question wrong. I only answered the last question wrong because I was rushing to finish. It had been going so well that I got excited as I neared the end. It only took me 25 minutes to finish, and we had an hour and fifteen minutes allotted for it. So I (and maybe a couple others) scored the highest grade in the class: 98%. The average for the class was 67, and the lowest grade was a 38%. He said those results are typical of the first exam because it covers a lot of material (history, research methods, etc.), and the next two exams are easier. He scaled our grades by 10 points, so he actually recorded a 108 for me.

We turned our reflection papers in on the same night as the exam and discussed the topic as a class after the exam. That discussion made me worry that what I had written wasn’t what he was looking for. It was such a broad topic that there was a lot of room to go astray. So I was really happy to see that I did just fine. He gave my paper an A+ which confused the hell out of me. His syllabus specifically states that he doesn’t grade with pluses and minuses, only whole letters. Anyway, he had to take them back after we saw our grades because he hadn’t recorded them in the book yet.

This week he passed them back, but a few of us (myself included) did not get ours back. He said he had forgotten that he had put some of them in a another pile and forgot to bring them when he grabbed his stuff before class. He asked us to come see him after class about it. So I obediently waited in line to talk to him after class. I was the only one who waited around as requested.

As it turns out, he had kept some of the A papers because he wants our permission to use them as examples (with or without our names hidden.) He said that some students want to know what an A paper is when they find that their paper didn’t get an A. For some reason, I didn’t see that coming with the way he had described just putting them in another pile, so I was a bit surprised at the question. I said, ‘sure’ as if he even needed to ask. I understand that he does need to ask out of respect for our privacy, but I didn’t write anything that I considered private. I don’t even care if he leaves my name on it. My work has been used without my permission before. I don’t really know why, but I just assume that I relinquish part of my rights to my work when I turn it over to a teacher.

Part of that could be from often needing to share my work with others at my job. I have had to learn to ‘let go’ of my code in that team environment where we cannot expect to always be solely responsible for programming a particular application. We have to be able todistribute the work load and get familiar with the work of the rest of the team. So I don’t clutch any type of work as tightly anymore.

Another way in which I learned to ‘let go’ is my family’s custom of passing cards around at special occasions – birthday cards, mothers day, fathers day, whatever. My last fathers day card to my grandfather got passed around and read aloud more than once. When I was younger I tried to avoid that custom at all costs. It made me procrastinate the card business until after parties when I could slip the belated card to the intended recipient after all the ‘public’ attention had passed the occasion. I would rather look like a bum than have someone other than the intended recipient read my thoughts. That’s another reason why I always chose to go with humor rather than sentimental cards when I knew the sharing was unavoidable.

It’s nice to be able to write about whatever I want in as many words as I want here. I can just ramble on and and on and on… But I will save the rest for later. At least I had something somewhat positive to say.