Category: 06: School Days
By Miguelito
(Note: Like so many of my homework assignments, I’m not fully following the directions on this.)
Hell is for Heroes Title
How many of you guys have heard of a little film called Hell is for Heroes?
You should check it out. Why? Well, it’s a good little WWII movie set on the Siegfried Line in France. It was directed by Don Siegel, who directed the 1950s classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers as well as two episodes of The Twilight Zone. Siegel would go on to direct Dirty Harry, The Shootist, and Escape from Alcatraz.
You might have heard of the cast, too:
Steve McQueen
Bobby Darin
Fess Parker
James Coburn
and, last-but-not-least:
Bob Newhart
Yep, button-down Bob himself. In case you were wondering, he plays a nebbish Army clerk who ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time. There’s even a sequence where he gets to do his famous telephone schtick. Speaking of Bobs, Bobby Darin does a bang-up job as wise-crackin’ scrounger from the Big City and more than holds his own, even against Steve McQueen
So, great director, great cast. What does this have to do with the assignment? Well, as you may have already guessed from the title of this post, it was filmed in Cottonwood, California.
Steve McQueen wonders why he took this role.
Apparently, France is a land of red dirt, scrub oaks, and manzanita. Who knew?
The film itself is pretty taut little film and it still very watchable today, once you get past the fact that these famous actors are playing soldier not far from where we did a quarter-century ago.
The famed red clay dirt of France
Some interesting tidbits: Much of the film takes place at night, because daytime temperatures were regularly hitting 110+. Obviously, they were filming during the summer. During the filming, Bobby Darin and the other stars were seen around Redding. They frequented the Squire Room and the Casablanca Lounge and stayed at apartments on Trinity Street which are still standing. Unfortunately, I don’t know which ones.
A look at the valley where most of the film is set.
The best I can determine from watching the movie is that it was filmed west of I-5, possibly near the truck scales. The U.S. soldiers are on a ridge top, facing west. (There’s a scene where you can see the hills north of Redding on their right.)
The final push on the German pillbox.
The producers took advantage of Shasta County’s long history of environmental ambivelance and really blew the place to hell. Trees were exploding everywhere, and there were tons of squibs and larger explosions. It looked damn good, even thrown against modern WWII flicks like Saving Private Ryan. The scenes of the larger guns firing (anything larger than a mortar) were stock footage, but that’s to be expected.
Tank traps or new art installation?
Anyway, I apologize for not having modern pics of the area, but if I can ever nail down its location, I promise I will make the trek to the wilds of Cottonwood and shoot it. Don’t worry, I’ll keep an eye open for the Wehrmacht.
By Eduardo
(phone rings)
“Hello?”
“EDUARDO… Hey… ahhh… Ben. Ben Bambauer here.”
“Oh, hi – how’s it going, Mr. Bambauer?”
“GOOD, good. H-hey, I uhh, was, uhhhmm…. wonderingifyoucouldmaybe – AHHHH… well, I had an idea for the next ad.”
“Okay…?”
“THE GEEK, like with his fist raised up with cash in it… you know?”
“I think so.”
“And the next one will be the one with him flying over the city like we talked about yesterday.”
“Right.”
“Ohhh… Okaywellthanksalot – and… yeah!”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah! Uhhh… See you later.”
“Bye.”
By Paco
Eduardo, take a look at what I found this morning while searching though my
MP3 discs….
Saturday Feb. 25th 8 PM, @ the Phoenix Theater…
And after the show we could go to Party Gras!!!
Hmm… I wonder what ever became of Clubberlang or the Mudsharks?
I have a feeling they didn’t quite have the same success that Sublime
enjoyed, and enjoyed to excess.
By Eduardo
CSUS was pretty cool overall, and a lot more fun than Sonoma State was. I had several memorable classes there… some good, some bad.
Jaime and I were there when the state universities switched their graduation requirements to a more ‘socially conscious’ system that made it necessary to take classes that you normally wouldn’t have to in order to graduate. For example, there was now a “diversity” requirement that could only be fulfilled by taking certain courses.
One added bonus to all this was that half the classes that I took at Sonoma State the semester prior were suddenly not transferable. It was utterly idiotic, and I made a stink about it – but the end result was that I had essentially wasted the better part of a semester because many of those classes didn’t matter anymore under the new system.
After getting this stuff sorted out, I was at a point where I needed to get this “diversity” requirement taken care of. I consulted the class catalog to try and find the most painless class in that category. There were some pretty weird-sounding ones in there, but eventually I found one that didn’t look too bad. FACS50: “The Family and Social Issues” sounded harmless enough, at least compared to the other options. The class catalog was kind of ambiguous on exactly what it was about, but essentially it was supposed to be a study of how families deal with different social and economic issues. It sounded boring, but also easy – and that’s all that mattered. I signed up, and Jaime did as well (upon realizing that he also needed to fill this requirement). I had learned from sharing Averbuck’s class with Paco that it was always easier to get through a bad class if you took it with a good friend / roommate.
As soon as the class began, our professor made it clear that we would be studying ALL different kinds of “families”, and that she’d be challenging our close-minded misconceptions about what the term ‘family’ really means.
She spent the entire semester having people with alternative lifestyles come in and speak to us about how wonderful and healthy their so-called families were. Among others, we had a couple of creepy gay guys come in and talk about how great it is that they can adopt little boys. We had transgender guest speakers, gay activist priests, just about anything you can think of. Every class seemed to incrementally take things just a little bit further, until we were practically studying bestiality as a viable alternative way to have a healthy family.
It was totally sick. The whole point of the class was to get you to understand that you are an ignorant, close-minded freak if you think that a straight, married man and woman with children is what makes a true, healthy family. The professor never even discussed the nuclear family – man, woman, and their children – except as an object of ridicule and disgust, as if the idea of normal people having normal relationships was personally offensive to her. This woman was so wacko that she made her fellow left-leaning professors look conservative.
Her appearance and general demeanor were not unlike those of Lady Elaine Fairchilde. Also much like that charred-faced puppet, she tried to indoctrinate her own personal views upon us using every means available – but failed miserably. Nearly everyone in the class refuted or challenged something she said at one point or another, and I doubt anybody bought a single thing she tried to teach us. Her instruction was so tainted with hatred toward normal people that many of us eventually started to mess with her.
Jaime and I used to have a lot of fun in that class, giving her smart answers to her wack questions. Everyone would laugh, and she’d get pissed. Eventually, she stopped calling on us altogether. Since hers was another one of those ‘ampitheater’ type classrooms, we used to joke about how rad it would be to bring a big bag of water balloons in and hurl them down at her from our seats up above.
I’m not sure how either of us passed that course, but we both did. I think we were pretty good about doing the homework, because we didn’t want to give her a chance to fail us for academic reasons.
I had many, many art classes at CSUS, since I was an art major. They were almost all completely worthless, and the only thing I really learned was that I definitely didn’t want to be a fine artist by trade. After being exposed to the types of people who populate the so-called “art scene”, I realized that I wanted no part of that world.
I switched gears and found a new passion in studying graphic design – far less subjective, less pretentious, and a much more viable career route. It was too late in the game to change my major, so I just finished up and got my BA in Studio Art.
Jaime and I had a class together called Intro to Computer Art, which was totally hilarious. It was the two of us and about 15 middle-aged folks, and the whole idea was that we’d be using Painter and Photoshop to explore this fascinating new world of computer art. This was back in late ’95, and Jaime and I were the only ones who were already quite familiar with the software. The professor talked to the class as if we were in the 4th grade, and would say stuff like “this computer pro-gram is similar to using a paint-brush… But this is a DIGITAL paint-brush.”
It was painful, but we did what we could to make it fun. Heck, getting credit toward my major for playing with Photoshop was cool.
There was a middle-aged Mexican gentleman in our class, and for some reason he took every possible opportunity to tell everyone how his people had been so mistreated and how totally oppressed he was. He was actually a really nice guy, but he was completely out of line for always trying to turn the classroom into a political forum – and he didn’t really even know what he was talking about. After a few weeks of this, he got to be pretty annoying.
Around the time that he was in full swing, we had an assignment to “create an image of a scene from our childhood” and to write a short corresponding essay explaining it – both of which we would present in front of the class.
Jaime and I came up with a funny idea, which manifested itself as my picture for the assignment. For my essay, I wrote about how when I was a young boy, all the men in our village had to carry the children to school in a giant taco because we were oppressed and could not afford a school bus.
The guy did not find my presentation very humorous. I felt kinda bad for poking fun at him, but I think he shut up after that.
Jaime and I had a lot of fun in that class, but the professor did not like him for some reason. The class was pretty lame, but at least we had Jim Ferry in there.
Awesome.
I also had two classes taught by this aging hippie professor who made no sense at all. He’d often wear Grateful Dead t-shirts and flip flops to class, which was kind of funny. He also used to openly brag about how much opium and pot he’d smoked over the years on his travels abroad, which of course won him a sizable contingent of admiring pothead students (“Dude, this guy’s hella cool”).
I had him for both History of Muslim Art and Occidental Art and Mythology; two classes that would have been quite interesting had they actually been taught by a real scholarly professor. I was disappointed, because I was actually pretty interested in both subjects – and I learned next to nothing.
The first day of class, he told us all that we could have whatever grade we wanted at the end of the semester, because he thought grading was stupid. I came to learn later that he was actually under fire at the time because he was ignoring most of the departmental rules as well as the required curriculum for the classes he taught.
He used to ramble on and on about the most random boring stuff I’d ever heard, as if he were trying to filibuster out any actual teaching. It seemed that almost all we ever did in either class was talk about his obsession with Sufism or his many travels to the middle and far east. One time, our “homework” assignment was to take a cold shower and wrap ourselves in a clean white sheet. It was supposed to be some kind of Sufi thing, I guess, but had nothing to do with what we were supposed to be learning. The guy really seemed like he could have been certifiably crazy.
Sometimes he would just spend the entire hour talking about what he did over the weekend. It was pretty weird, but was also enough to put one to sleep… so after several tedious months of this, I simply stopped attending his classes. He wasn’t going to grade us anyway, and he didn’t care about attendance either – so I stopped going.
I went back right at the end of the semester, and told him that I wanted a “B” in both classes. He gave me a funny smile, and I was a little scared that he might have been a little mad or something… but I found out later that he gave me A’s in both classes. Kooky as he was, he sure gave my GPA a healthy boost that semester.
Graduation was just one confusing hurdle after another. Get this, have that signed, have this signed AND sealed, send this in, get that approved, get these signed, photocopy this, give us these in triplicate. They really don’t want you to leave, because after you’re out you don’t have to give them any more money.
Nevertheless, after 2½ years, I finally got out of there with my BA.
Overall, CSUS was a fun school to go to. It was kind of generic, and a lot less fun after Jaime graduated and moved on, but I enjoyed it.
By Eduardo
Sonoma was pretty lame, in retrospect. Paco and I lived together that semester, which made things better than they would have been otherwise – but the school itself was pretty weak.
Averbuck’s class was quite entertaining, and it was in one of those stadium/ampitheater type classrooms. I also can’t recall exactly why (maybe because he was a little bit like my former Political Science teacher, Mr. Rogers), but Paco and I would indeed often joke about pushing our rotund professor down the stairs. Sometimes he got fired up about something, and could be fairly annoying.
The worst – yet most hilarious – experience I ever had in his class was one day when he gave us a special slide presentation . He was going to be lecturing on the value in understanding alternate philosophical viewpoints, as well as the importance in facing one’s own fears and insecurities encountered in doing so. He fired up the projector and showed us a wide array of photos by Robert Mapplethorpe and others, mostly showing different kinds of homosexual leather bondage stuff. It was frightening, hearing him cheerfully going on about how “ground breaking” all this stuff was, artistically. Call me close-minded if you will, but I fail to find any artistic merit in a photo of a guy with his arm up another guy’s butt.
He paused on one particular slide: a waist-down shot of a black guy in a suit, with his kielbasa hanging out. As Paco said, “no thanks!”.
So there we were, a class of about 100 people, with a ten-foot high johnson on the projector screen in front of us. I could tell that I wasn’t the only one who wanted him to just move on and get that thing out of our faces, but he wouldn’t. The photo was one of the central points of discussion for his lecture, and he confided in us that this particular work had caused a reaction in him.
“…and it was this piece that made me realize that I fear the black man’s penis.”
I couldn’t believe what we were hearing. I wasn’t sure if I should laugh, cry, or walk out. He went on to explain in full detail how the photo made him recognize, acknowledge, and eventually understand his fear of the black man’s penis. He must have lectured for at least ten minutes about how white males subconsciously feel inferior to blacks because of genital size. In his words, this photo is particularly confrontational to white men for this reason. He emphasised the importance of overcoming such things in order to be “culturally enlightened” or whatever, but never did said whether or not he overcame this fear himself.
I remember leaving class that day, a little shaken by how surreal the preceding 1.5 hours had been. As we walked out, Paco and I compared our reactions to the lecture and presentation.
“I’ve never really even thought about it before, but yeah, I guess I DO fear the black man’s penis. I mean, especially after having one stare us in the face for a half hour. That was freakin’ sick.”
“Yeah, me too. I guess we’re not culturally enlightened.”
“Guess not. I mean, now that I think about it, I fear the WHITE man’s penis, too… or ANY man’s penis, really.”
“Definitely.”
“Let’s go push Averbuck down the stairs.”
Aside from the occasionally interesting Philosophy class and a few others, Sonoma State was a major disappointment. It was smaller than Sierra College, and had fewer students – or so it seemed. There was absolutely no college “scene” there, and the professors were all pretty wack. Plus, it rained almost every single day that entire semester. It didn’t take long for me to decide to move back to warm and sunny Sacramento to finish up my college career at CSUS.
Even though he’s long since retired, I think it would be funny to get in touch with Mr. Averbuck and ask him if he still fears the black man’s penis.
I hope so, for his sake.
By Jaimenacho
After leaving CSUS I attended Simpson College in Redding, Ca.
I attended Simpson for a few reasons.
1) I wasn’t about to stay in Sacramento and take remedial English, and Art History in addition to my Teacher preparation courses.
2) I would save money. Simpson was located IN Redding, and I could live at home. After 3 years of excitement in Sacramento, home sounded pretty nice.
3) It was a shorter program by about 6 months.
4) I could student teacher at my old high school, which is something I always wanted to do.
Getting into the program, as I mentioned was fairly easy. I applied, got an interview, and was accepted. The only problem was trying to figure out what type of program I had been in at Sacramento.
When you go into a credentialing program there’s 2 routes you can take
Route 1-You take your course work, and take a subject competency test for your specific subject. This is what a lot of Science, Math, English, and History teachers do to get their credential.
Route 2-A waiver program. It basically says you’ve take an extra amount of coursework in substitution of taking a test.
I had no idea if CSUS was a waiver program, or relied on using state tests. I needed to find out however. I of course preferred the waiver option. It would mean no test. I didn’t like tests.
I went down to CSUS one afternoon, and wandered around for a couple hours trying to find out if we were on a waiver program, or not. Nobody could tell me. I called Simpson College and told them my situation. They said if I could get a document with the official CSUS seal on it, signed by the Dean of Education saying I was in a waiver program, then that would be fine. That sounded hard.
I went to one of the main offices at CSUS, and told them I needed something on “official” paper, saying that CSUS Art dept. was on a waiver program, and sort of explained my situation. The lady kind of looked at me funny but went ahead and typed it out for me, and had the Dean sign it, and gave it to me. I turned it in to Simpson, they accepted it, and I was good to go. It was too easy.
To this day I don’t know if I completed an actual waiver program or not.
Simpson is a Christian college first and foremost. Their basic job is to educate missionaries, and future pastors. They decided that there was a great market for a Teacher Credentialing program as well, so they decided to offer one. My group was one of the first through the program.
The program was a total joke.
They made the first mistake of lumping all the elementary teachers in the same classes with all the secondary teachers. We’d spend a week or two sometimes learning how phonics are an important part of our students day.
When was the last time your high school english teacher taught phonics. The only high school kids who still learn phonics have other issues.
We spent time doing all sorts of little kid type activities. The primary educators out numbered the secondary edcucators by about 10 to 1, so of course all the lessons were geared towards preparing them, and we were told to “adapt” what we learned to our own level.
Sometimes the secondary students were given packets to read, and we were sent in other rooms to read these packets while the primary teachers had lectures and guest speakers. We weren’t getting the same quality of education as our fellow future educators, that was for sure.
I had a teacher for my Curriculum class named Mrs. Brooks. She was a nice lady, but for some reason she hated my soul. I think part of it had to do with the fact, I knew we were not being given the same bang for our buck as the primary teachers, and I made a point of making my views known whenever I could.
One instance we had to prepare a math lesson for primary kids. What this had to do with me teaching high school art was beyond me, but I did it. I showed some hip hop Sesame Street thing about the number 5, and gave out a lot of candy, and stuff in piles of 5. I made sure to use extra cheesy primary teacher voice for the whole thing.
“O.K kids, let’s count to 5 to-ge-ther!! oooone…..twooooo…..threeeee…four….FIVE!!! YAAAAY!”
The class thought it was great, Mrs. Brooks did not.
YOU CAN’T READ!!
One time she had this group come into show us a demonstration on what it was like to have a learning disability. These people put you in different groups, and gave different “activities” to perform. The problem was that one or two people in each group had different materials than the rest. One group would have a story to read aloud, and each person would be asked to read a specific section. One person’s section, had letters that were all mixed up, backwards, or on different levels. When they asked the person with this copy to read, of course, they had trouble.
To make it worse, the “teachers” made you feel bad for not being able to read this garble. This was supposed to simulate how some teachers can’t detect learning disabilities, so they get frustrated, angry, or just assume the kid is stupid. They of course had “teachers” playing angry, frustrated teacher, as well as paitient, kind teacher.
I saw this activity as totally unrealistic. The “kids” were all future teachers with BA degrees, who just sat there and took the abuse the “teachers” gave out.
This wasn’t real life.
In real life these are the kids who act out, and cause disruptions.
With the help of my friend Alan, I decided to help make the simulation more “real”
The “teachers” would walk around your group and say things like
“Ok Jaimenacho, it’s your turn to read…please read the next section.”
Of course my section was jumbled letters, and made no sense. So we’d begin our “simulation”
“I can’t read this…it’s a bunch of jumbled letters.”
“What’s the matter? I asked you to read that section. Is it too hard for you?”
“No,it’s jumbled. I can read his paper, you didn’t jumble the letters on his.” I’d say pointing to my neoghbors packet.
This of course wasn’t what they wanted me to say.
“I’m more interested in you reading your own paper, and not your neighbors.”
“Well then you shouldn’t have given me one with jumbled letters.”
“Ok we’ll just give you some more time…pay attention to your friends as they read.”
The teacher would let others read and be very positive as they read out loud.
“Good Job Anna!!! nice reading. Did you see how well she did Jaime, and how she did that?”
“I bet you I could read her packet too.”
No response.
Alan would have a similar packet, on another table, and he’d have trouble reading his packet and I’d take the role of the bully.
“HAHA you can’t read. YOU’RE STUPID.”
“Shut your mouth grease FACE!!”
“Don’t call me GREASE-FACE illiterate freak!!”
“Be quiet, I’ll kick your rear.”
“FINE liet’s get it on, I’ll meet you behind the library. That’s the building with all those books you can’t read in it.”
We’d banter like this for a while; Slip each other nasty notes. Eventually the “teachers” got sick of it.
“Why don’t you go sit outside Jaime.”
The funniest part was they were seriously sick of me. I had totally ruined their “simulation”.
Of course I didn’t go outside. I went and hid under a table, and started throwing paper at people. Alan of course participated as well.
After awhile, the “teachers” ended the simulation. They tried to sum it up with as positive a spin as they could put on it. It was great, they looked so frazzled by the end of the thing. It made it more obvious how hard it was to teach kids like that. They didn’t even stick around for follow up questions. ANd everyone wanted to know how to deal with “kids” like us.
Of course this didn’t set well with my professor either.
She called me into a “meeting”
She called me unprofessional, and a few other names. She told me NO school would hire me. I wore jeans to class, and didn’t dress professionally, etc, etc. I tried to explain to her that what I wore to class, and to my job are totally unrelated. I also took my opportunity to let her know I was paying about 10 grand to be taught how to teach 1st grade. It became clear after about 5 minutes of our “meeting” that nothing would be resolved, so she excused me.
Just to make her mad I would wear Knit beanies to class the rest of the year.
JUST LIKE A PRAYER
Every class was begun by saying a prayer; which was fine. It was a Christian school first and foremost. I had no problem with saying a prayer before class. Unfortunately, Alan saw it as a moment of quiet time he could try and make me laugh. I would be there with my head bowed, and eyes closed ON purpose so I wouldn’t have to look in his direction. He’d always, grab my knee, shoulder, or do something stupid, and I’d be fighting back laughter. It was like this every day.
Overall I got a second rate education, for a first rate price. I didn’t learn anything about education that wasn’t basic common sense. I understood a lot about primary education, but very little about secondary education. I think however, the program has been drastically improved in the years that followed. I’d like to think we had something to do with that.
By Eduardo
Here’s the story in a nutshell…
My grades in high school proved that I wasn’t exactly Rhodes Scholar material, so I was destined to begin my college career at a JC. Due to a number of interwoven factors (mainly my parents’ desire for me to become independent and the terms of my financial sustenance), I ended up at Sierra College in Rocklin, about 25 miles northeast of Sacramento. Sierra was one of the only JC’s in northern California that had dormitories, and that’s where I lived during my first couple of years there.
It was a weird time, at first, mainly because I was so disoriented. Nearly all my amigos locos were still up in Redding, save for Pecos (who was at Sac State) and Pepe (at UC Davis). I had suddenly been thrust into a strange alien environment where I was the only person who didn’t drive a monster truck and worship the Steve Miller Band.
At first, it was horrible living with all those tarheads. There were few girls there, and most of them had Copenhagen circles in their jeans pockets. Awesome.
It was as if I was being punished for all those times I drew pictures in class instead of paying attention. Ultimately, though, I came to realize that being exposed to all these different types of people – even extremely wack people – forced me to develop much better social skills.
I will have to expand upon my experiences in the dorm in a later entry (under a more appropriate topic), and will be sure to cover my experiences with Amon, my cro-magnon roommate (and, of course, Numb John).
School-wise, Sierra was actually pretty darn respectable. I would have to say that I learned more, had better instructors, and just generally had a better experience (educationally speaking) there than I did at Sonoma State or even CSUS later on. The teachers there were mostly level-headed people that actually taught things, instead of being rabid activists interested solely in the indoctrination of their students (as was the case at the universities).
I did have one teacher at Sierra who would have been right at home on the university level. Mr. Rogers, my Political Science instructor, was an outspoken Socialist who used his classroom to preach the gospel of Lenin under the guise of teaching Political Science. Like so many other esteemed educators, he eloquently taught that virtually every known problem in the modern world could be traced back to the Reagan administration and/or Newt Gingrich.
Initially, few people ever challenged anything he said and just absorbed everything with wide-eyed apathy. Because of this, he started getting bolder and bolder in his assertions, taking his twisted teaching a little further each class period. He was always trying to prove how “progressive” he was, always being sure to mention that he had gay friends and that he hung out with black people a lot. He even went so far as to tell us that he didn’t like white people, somehow overlooking the fact that he himself was a middle-aged, fat pasty white guy.
After a couple of months of tolerating his rants, a few people in the class started to question and then openly challenge his arguments with basic factual information. I even got in on it, being kind of a smart alec and all – but I knew what I was talking about. I had gotten so charged up in class that I would go and research the stuff in the library. It got pretty intense at times, because when it came down to examining cold hard facts, Mr. Rogers was almost always proven wrong… and when this happened, he got PISSED. Nevertheless, the class forced us all to examine our political allegiances with a little more scrutiny than we’d expected, and that was a good thing. Mister Rogers remained in the Neighborhood of Make Believe, but many of his students emerged from his class a bit stronger and wiser.
I was sure he would fail me. He didn’t like me one bit, and on more than one occasion roared in anger over stuff I said to him in class. Surprisingly, I got a B, which is exactly what I deserved. He may have been a Marxist and a terrible teacher, but at least he was fair.
I had an Intermediate Sculpture class that my friend (and then roommate) Todd took with me. It was cool, but I barely passed because nearly every time we went, he would convince me to ditch class with him to go play pool. We’d go back to the dorm and spend the next two hours “playin’ stick” while listening to Paul’s Boutique and Check Your Head. I had made a tape with both albums on it, and I think we listened to it every single time we played. It was like a ritual, three times a week. I didn’t do much sculpture that semester, but got pretty darn good at pool.
As the end of the semester neared, we realized that we should probably check in to see if we had any hope of passing the class. It was one of those pointless classes that didn’t really require much work or participation, and as it turned out each student only had to turn in 3 works for the final grade.
Knowing that art teachers are typically very touchy-feely and quick to celebrate mediocrity, Todd and I both decided to do our 3 projects each – all in one day.
We went in there on a Saturday and just started throwing stuff together. I made this weird thing with balloons filled with plaster of Paris, which I figured ought to earn a few points for originality. We both made some weird sculptures with clay and stuff, and I finished off with a big carving of a fist that I made out of a giant block of styrofoam. It was totally random.
By the end of the weekend we had more or less completed our works, and they were actually cooler than what most of our classmates had spent the past five months working on. We ended up getting B’s in the class, and we celebrated by playing one last game of stick.
Due to too many games of pool and just generally being a slacker, I spent a little more time than I’d originally planned at Sierra. When I was ‘done’ and ready to transfer to Sonoma State, I was informed by my counselor that I didn’t have sufficient math credits to transfer. They let me transfer anyway, under the condition that I agreed to take a math course within a year.
Once I got in at Sonoma and started picking my classes, I found that all the math classes were full – so I figured I’d just take one the next semester. Well, I decided to transfer to CSUS after only one semester there, so I never took the math course.
I soon found out that the only way I’d be able to continue on to CSUS was for me to take some kind of math class in summer school. I agreed to do so and enrolled in the summer school program, knowing full well that my parents would castrate me if I fouled up my progress toward graduation any more than I already had.
Unfortunately, when it came time to sign up for the classes, all the Basic Math for Retards classes filled up instantly – and I was out of luck. I had to find some kind of math class, but what? I was a total math idiot, so whatever it was would have to be pretty low caliber.
Finally, I found a math class that had one vacancy: Intermediate Statistics. I signed up, fully aware that I had zero chance of passing the class. I figured I might as well give it my best shot; at least my folks would have some sympathy for me if I tried.
I was buried from day one. I understood nothing, but forced myself to take notes anyway. My notebook was soon filled with greek letters, equations that took up two pages, and notes from the lecture. For once, I didn’t draw or daydream in class. I did all the homework, even though my answers were almost akways wrong. The teacher was extremely cool, and knew that I was struggling – so he would answer my questions after class when I needed him to.
I was still almost completely lost, though, and kept trying to figure out why I coulsn’t seem to learn this stuff. When it came time for the final, I think I had a D minus. I had to get a C or better in the class in order to get the transfer credit, so I was pretty discouraged. Nevertheless, I decided to go for it as best I could.
The night before the final, I made a strong pot of coffee. I pored over my textbook and notes and homework for hours, and finally things started clicking. I actually began to understand the stuff… I couldn’t believe it. It was as if the whole entire class suddenly made sense to me. I studied and studied and read and wrote sample equations all through the night until my eyes wouldn’t stay open any more. I went to sleep around 4:00 in the morning, totally exhausted – but stoked, because I now understood Intermediate Statistics. Assuming I was conscious for the final, I was going to kick some booty.
…And that I did. I got a high B on the final, effectively boosting my grade up to the C that I needed. The teacher was astonished, and so was I. I was free and clear to transfer to CSUS as planned…
