This may in fact be the first such moment of this semester thus far. I was surfing the Internet in the dorm this afternoon and my friend, walking by, asked automatically, "What are you doing, homework?" It was then that I realized I will have no homework for three weeks. Three weeks! Imagine that. I spent an hour tonight playing more or less guiltlessly a surprisingly addictive vocabulary game.
True, I have two more finals tomorrow, 8 am to 10 am and 10:30 am to 12:30 pm, but I think I've studied for them sufficiently. I don't forsee any problems there. I breezed through my Psych final on Tuesday, despite the fact that my professor, after having told us on Thursday that the test would comprise just twenty questions from the last chapter of the text, sent us an e-mail Monday night encouraging us to study for the thirty-five additional questions that he had neglected to mention. Hmmm. Good therapist, I'm sure, but lousy prof.
I worked until six like usual Tuesday night, then grabbed dinner before returning to the library for a World Civ study session, my third in a week. We were feeling rather helpless at the end--it was so much information, and there was so much still that could be discussed. How could we know whether we'd be prepared? I went to bed that night with Herodotus, and woke up with him too, for that matter. This policy served me well. By the time I finished my oatmeal, the Persian Empire was actually making sense.
The exam was hard (six essays, two hours . . . go!) and painful (my writer's cramp lasted through lunch and my first shift at the library). But I'm thinking, hoping, I did well. It's a testament to my prof that I could now sit down with questions like "What does the Bhagavad Gita say about peace and harmony?" or "Asoka wanted to create a Buddhist empire; Charlemagne a Christian empire. Describe the goals, programs, and long-term effects of each" and actually have something to say. It was a good course. If I get an A, it'll be a great course, potentially one of my favorites.
My fridge is defrosted. My dirty clothes are piled up. My finals are almost over. I'm ready to go home.
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5 comments:
Where did you end up at Freerice? I orbit 43, with gusts to 47.
Mmmm...pretty much the same. I couldn't seem to break 47, even though the words started repeating. I wonder how they determine the difficulty level; obscurity is so relative.
I got to 48 today! Of course I immediately missed four in a row to drop to 44.
I read somewhere on the site that they assign levels to words based on how frequently people get them wrong. That seems a rather elegant solution, which (over the long term) would sort everyone into their proper vocabulary percentile -- assuming they don't just memorize all the words.
Congratulations! Do you think it's a percentile? I'd like to flatter myself that I would be ranked higher than that. Assigning the levels according to participants' scores makes sense, though.
I used percentile a bit roughly; judging from the difficulty of the words and -- all flattery aside -- our skill with language, I imagine that anything much higher than 42 or so is well into the 99th percentile of American English speakers!!
The game's not set up to rank users quite as well as it ranks words, since it uses the rough (and sometimes cruel) one wrong/three right dichotomy... I admit, I didn't know an eland was an antelope!
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