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sublingua | |||||
| The heart with a mind of its own.(Be present.) | The mind with a heart of its own.(It's past.) | The dream that is your waking life.(Go there now.) | |||
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second-grade training in calculus
I'm supposed to be here--no, wait, that was a bit of a Freudian slip. What I meant to say was: I'm supposed to be studying for calculus. My average in the class after a week and two quizzes is a whopping 25%. Yes, I didn't drop a zero or anything. I really only have 25%. So, I probably should study a bit sometime this weekend. So, speaking of calculus quizzes: Yesterday was our second quiz, and I failed it miserably. I couldn't answer a single question, and I was transported back in time to when I was in the first grade and I used to get sent to the third grade class for reading since I had exhausted the curriculum for the first two grades in about a third of the year. I used to go two or three times a week and on one of the days I didn't go, the teacher would hand out the spelling list and on one of the days that I DID go, the teacher would give the spelling test. I therefore didn't know any of the words on test day, so I always used to sit there, practically in tears, not being able to spell and not knowing what was going to fix this problem. The teacher would take my test and draw a big red zero on it and then draw an unhappy face in the zero. She would draw tears coming down the zero face and a big puddle of tears underneath. Then she would hand back my test. I couldn't understand why I was doing so badly. In the first grade we didn't do spelling tests, so I didn't know that the teachers were supposed to give you a list of words to study. The third grade teacher never thought to give me the list on a different day or to excuse me from having to take the test. Week after week, this little bit of humiliation went on. Occassionally, I could spell one of the words, which I think only confirmed to her that I was just wasn't studying hard enough. So there I was in calculus. And the first bit of calculus isn't that hard, but I'm a bit of a math idiot. I've come to rely on the $100 calculator that we are required to purchase for every math class from algebra onward, so I get this quiz, and I can do the calculus, but I can't do things like take the sqare root of some number that isn't squared (or whatever it's called). So, I'm on the first step, trying to simplify some polynomial with a square root in it, but I can't get past that step, and so I failed the quiz. Then I come out of failing the quiz with ten minutes to get to work and there's a yellow envelope shoved under my windshield wiper. The quiz had taken me so long that my time ran out on the meter, and I got a parking ticket. I was late to work because I had to drive home and back in an effort not to cry. This was 8:50 in the morning. The day went downhill from there and didn't end until 2:00 am.
More lies:
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