A Whole New Can of Worms

Today’s class was so boring, I started doing my homework during class, on scrap paper. The plan was to recopy it to lined paper at home. The homework was so easy I finished it. Then I waited 30 minutes and got suicidally bored again. Then I took out my looseleaf and copied my homework to hand-in format. Then I waited another 20 minutes.

And then we had our mid-class break.

Needless to say, this is going to be exceedingly painful. I’ve had this professor before. Only for one semester (until now), but he really stuck out. I filled an entire page of notes for my post tonight, a very very rare accomplishment.

You see, this professor is very redundant. For instance, and this isn’t even a good example, he wanted an experiment where one flipped a coin. “There are two outcomes,” he explained, “heads or tails. There are no sides.” To clarify, “either heads up, or tails up.” But just in case “I could have a head, if a head is up, or I could have a tail, if a tail is up.” This is all in a 40 second span, as though the concept of flipping a coin is so tremendously difficult to understand. And lets not talk about bags of marbles. Hell, say I took a marble, and I threw it in the bag and I mixed that bag all up, man, then, well, then I have a whole new ball game don’t I? Don’t I? Tell me again, is that a brand new thing, like, if I were to throw that marble back in the bag and shake it all up??? Don’t you think???

That’s another thing. If I were a math teacher, I wouldn’t use bags of marbles. I’d use cans of worms. Or maybe barrels of monkeys, cats in bags, peas in pods, something other than bags of marbles. I might say, “now say we have two types of annelids in a can, nightcrawlers and those little skinny ones that die on your driveway. Say I opened my can of worms, and pulled a worm out, etc etc.” Or I might have a barrel of monkeys or I could let a cat out of the bag and determine the chance that it was a black cat. If anyone thought I was funny, I’d give him an A, because, damnit, things are funny in math class that aren’t funny other places. Like, take the disaster this weekend. Looks of pain and misery, not funny. Go to math class, very similar looks of pain and misery. Now, those looks are funny. You see, math is a different world.

As is my math class’s custom, there’s something for me to pay attention to other than math. While a different breed than Multi-Colinearity Girl, she looks sharp as a tack, and I plan on marrying her before I run out of Q Tips. Either that or never talking to her. I did talk to a random girl today at break, or, more accurately, she talked to me. You see, she had the hiccups. She also explained that she was trying to finish her cookie before she went back to class. “Well, that’s the sort of attitude that got you hiccups in the first place,” I politely explained to her. “Attitude!?” she snorted back. And that, my dear friends, is why I don’t talk to people I don’t know.

In the end, I have one final note, a note to self. “Bring a book.”

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