hello cd, i am with you, in thati have always, without fail, found the easy way out
i had a C- average in highschool, F's and D's for the first 2.5 years (except A+ in German throughout) and A+ the last 1.5 years. At year -1.5, my mom discovered that I had been signing my dad's signature on the report cards ever since 7th grade, and I got a 100 on a remedial math class which felt good and motivated me to study a bit. you know the tale, collapse, and rise, a cyclical chain of happenings.
my college transcripts looked like the reverse of my highschool transcript, with higher performance at the beginning than at the end, and during fall semesters than during spring season ... step function, going in the incorrect direction
college was meant to be fun, and so i did, tooling in my scirocco, then mazda, checking out antler's inn on thursday nights (steamers from nyc) and dunbars on fridays
i learned a lot from my jewish brothers at my jewish fraternity, zbt, zillions billions trillions, zeta beta tomata, and i learned what not to do ... there was one kid in my fraternity who would deliberately drop out of any course where he was not going to get an A and take it over in the next go around ... to maintain an A average and get into medical school
as to the pre-kinergarten test, they are required for all facilities, local and international, and so cannot be helped, although the rigor differ
we chose the kindergartens where erita's playmates from playschool might be going to, wich in turn is actually based on (i) fun and learning (as opposed to learning and learning) and (ii) distance to home. our coconut likes to hang with a few kids in the neighborhood whose parents are friends of ours to begin with, and so all is pretty natural
i remember one college calculus exam question i had to do, one of five, where the swedish prof had warned beforehand that one of the five nasty questions only the very best would be able to do ... the particular question stumped me, and so i skipped it to do the other four ... then i returned to the tough question ... we were doing integrals at the time, and the question asked for the volume of space left over after a sphere was subtracted from a cube ... i could not do the integrals ... so i used the geometry formulae for a cube and a sphere and did the subtraction
it turned out that in fact was the question only the very best are expected to do ... during the post exam explanation, the prof wrote a whole blackboard of formulae that to this day i cannot hope to do ... the class went whoa ... and then the prof said, 'and one of you, mr. chen, did the problem this way' ... wrote the formulae in 5 seconds, and the class went dead silent ... i remember the moment fondly ... beats a touch down pass or whatever they do in what passes for football :0) |
