Mine is I have a 4.0 in an English class! I r learned gooderest at grammar’en noa!
Seriously though, it was hard. Half the class, despite being english composition, was in greek. Now I know how people feel with computer jargon, because I spent a good of time looking up what things meant. The class dominated my week. Making money, other classes, sleep, eating, etc. were just trivial things to be handled when this class permitted. I road a bike a couple of times, 20 miles round trip on a very badly built bike seat just to make it to class.
I studied and studied but only got 80-something percent on the tests. I don’t mean to sound spoiled or anything but I’m used to getting really high scores, near 100%, without even trying very hard. Except English classes. I took this class for an elective because I needed it for another elective class I wanted. I ended up living and breathing just to see if I could get a good grade. Even now the lessons feel I jammed a square peg into a round head, or maybe a round peg into a blockhead.
The final grade was posted yesterday. 4.0, it is sweet. It is delicious. It is win. It is victory.
Congratulations! I understand the sense of accomplishment from that; I’m back in school now, and while I never got terrible grades (I was generally in the 70s or so, more due to lack of effort than lack of ability), I’m discovering a new way to study and getting better grades, and I’m generally happy with it. I’m hovering around a 3.5 GPA, which isn’t really all that bad for Mechanical Engineering (and my relatively old rusty brain!), and that’s my minimum target…anything better is just icing on the cake!
I’m still super-proud of my 93% in Ordinary Differential Equations, and I’ll take my B (75 ish) in Partial Differentials any day!
Sweated blood over my first (post-grad) Law subject. Stayed awake for three days when I realised I had to write a 10,000 word research paper. Just found out I got First Class Honours.
I skied the “Highest Permanantly Established” ski area*. Mt. Chacaltaya, in Bolivia. Glacier outside of La Paz. Had to grab a wire driven by a rigged-up Chevy 350 with a metal hook you had to wrap around your waist when you got to the top. Actually had to “leap” over a cravass at one point. Passed out in the taxi back to La Paz on the way back from oxygen deprevation. Just about 2x higher than my normal skiing altitude.
I actually shreaded that MF’ing joint!* Took the longest skis they had available (180’s, with 1/4 of an edge ripped off- I normally skied 205’s) and proceeded to carve turns and do shit no one there (maybe 20-25 others) had ever thought possible. Actually had one kid come up and ask for a freakin’ autograph as I was slowly passing out in the “lodge”! Didn’t have any gloves and didn’t care. Easter Sunday, 1984. Also my sister’s birthday, as I recall. Got pictures to prove it, too!
Kinda sad, now. The glacier has melted, as I read in National Geographic.
*17,250ft. Nat’l Geo., June 2007. The top photo on page 59 actually shows the “lodge” and the tow-rope.
When I studied linguistics we had a take home exam to be completed over the weekend. It was a kind of logic puzzle, using a fictional language. It was fun, and I knocked it off in a couple of hours. Come monday morning, in the student cafeteria, the rest of the class shows up, because they know where I have my morning coffee, and not one of them was able to work out the puzzle. So I told them all the answer and that was that.
Except I kept one tiny tiny piece of information to myself, the piece that made the puzzle complete (instead of just seemingly complete). Our proffessor gave most people about 100 percent for getting the right answer, and gave me 110%. When I spoke to her later she just told me that she knew I gave everyone else the answer but she wasn’t going to make a big deal of it.
So I’ve scored higher that the theoretical 100% limit on a test at university. Yay me.
