Return of The Shadow

After a long absence, the Shadow finally returns.

I'm wondering at this time whether I should write multiple little posts as the memories come back to me or if I should write one huge monster post. Knowing my past track record, it's a pretty sure bet that I'll choose the latter, but never fear! I will use paragraphs!

As most people already know, or may have guessed even if they didn't hear it from me first, this semester has been extremely busy for me. I remember at the beginning of the year thinking that I was “only” taking five classes, with “only” 15 credits and it wouldn't be that much more of a load to take an extra class, especially because I'd be up at College nearly all the time with not much else to do. In my spare time I had determined that I'd be reading some more in my theological books.

Such were the plans, yet that is not how it has turned out to be.

To refresh everyone's minds, I'm taking

Engineering Design with AutoCAD

Calculus II

Computer Science II

Digital Logic Design

General Physics I (Calculus based for Engineers mainly).

And so far I would probably claim that my easiest class is the Physics. Not that any of the classes would be extremely hard if they weren't all so very time-consuming. Engineering Design has lecture homework every week which generally takes a few hours of drawing or researching and writing to come up with a good design or solution to the problem that has been posed for the week. So many of the other students hate the instructor, I hear people all over campus saying how hard the class is and how they couldn't stand it or the teacher. On my part though, I really think that the Instructor is extremely well prepared every week, his lectures are full of information regardless of how other students claim he talks about “nothing.” He pushes me to try harder and hopefully be a better engineer because of it. I have to admit though, that the entire class is very time-consuming, what with the homework, the labs on Friday (with more homework from there) and all of the assigned reading, it can take up a lot of time really quick.

The Calculus II class is very interesting in my opinion and I'm enjoying it a lot, but we are trying to cover so much material in such a short amount of time that it is very difficult to let it all solidify. Unfortunately for me, most stuff seems to solidify after I've taken an exam for some reason. The homework assigned almost always takes between 3 and 5 hours a week to finish but again, I think it's very helpful for me to do the amount of problems he gives, for I know that I probably would not do that much extra work if it wasn't assigned. The last exam we had in that class was very disappointing, I had studies for about 6 hours or more just for this exam, in addition to the homework and yet I felt completely unprepared for the number of questions and the type of questions that were on the exam and left feeling horrible. When we got the results back I had scored in the upper area of the range, but that upper area was about a 55%! That was about where the A's were for that exam. I am thankful he is grading on a curve (or no one would even pass the class) but I still felt very horrible about such a poor score.

The Computer Science class is a lot of fun and I'm picking up a lot but one of the instructor's methods is to let us discover things on our own, so he'll tell us what we need to do and what method we need to do it with but then we have to figure out how to use that method. Java is not very well-documented online and there are precious few examples of how to do certain things so it's been difficult for me. I feel like I'm stumbling around in the dark, trying to turn on the light in a room that I don't even know if it has a light switch, let alone where it would be if it did! In short: sometimes it's a nightmare. As I said, I enjoy the class but I just don't have enough time to be spending trying out lots of different things and how to do them. The last program I did took me over 12 hours to get. I realize that I'm not very good at programming but 12 hours is a lot, even if it is spread over the course of a week and a half. I've been seeing the Instructor for that class during every office hour he has (two hours a week generally) and trying to keep ahead on the programming assignments, but I can't spend all my time on the programs, I have to try to make the best use of my time for all my classes.

I have no fear that I'll pass all of my classes, but what I do fear is that I'm spreading my time too thinly over them, is it better to get one C and the rest A's or all B's?

Digital Logic is another class that just takes up a lot of time. I probably spent about 10 hours or more (broken up over a week) on the last project, which pales in comparison to our final project. The other one was very fun once you finally got it working though and I'm really excited about this final project: we are to build a video game, that means designing the game, programming it using a VGA controller (that's the graphics) and making a box for it, basically a cabinet like an arcade game, a controller such as a joystick to control the game, I mean, we're doing everything! That should be a lot of fun, however, the tools that we are using to program the game, since I did the entire last project myself (it's hard to get my team members motivated sometimes) I am the one who knows the most about the software we're using to create. So apparently I'll be in charge of that. As far as designing the box goes, well, again, at least two of my team members are not good with hand tools or power tools and since I've had experience in that area and have all the ideas anyway, I think that I'll probably be the one working on that too. Perhaps I put this all on myself, I don't know.

Admittedly when I was working on the last project at a couple of points I just said to my team mates that there was nothing they could really do at that point, I just had to figure out how to implement the logic that “we” had already designed. So I told them they could go home. However, there have also been times where one team mate would say “oh I planned on coming in today and working on the project but never got around to it.” No one ever came in unless I contacted them, there's just not a lot of motivation. I wonder if they would have stepped up to the plate if I hadn't been on the team.

Physics is going well for the most part, I have had perfect scores on the quizzes so far, and after only two more quizzes then I'll be set because we drop the two lowest quiz scores so anything I make after that won't matter (well, of course they'll matter to me, but not in a technical sense). In lab however, the TA has had a few complaints. He tells me that he can see I definitely understand the material but I don't use the correct words or something. For example, there was a section where I had mentioned the Position vs. Time Squared graph in my analysis of the Position vs. Time graph so he told me that that answer was incorrect and that since the second part was based off of the first, that the entire next one must be incorrect as well (he didn't finish reading either section) and marked off a big fat -8 for the entire page, in other words, 0 points for that part. I showed him how yes, I mentioned the graph of Position vs. Time Squared to make a point about the slope of the line, but that directly underneath that I clearly said spoke about and analyzed the graph in question and that my second part was also completely correct. He wouldn't listen but after haggling for ten minutes he grudgingly gave back 2 points, which I still wasn't satisfied. I could understand losing two points because I made mention of a graph that wasn't needed (it was just additional information that wasn't asked for). He's a nice guy, his name is Hamid, but getting points out of him is like squeezing water from a rock, or pulling teeth!

I talked to the Physics professor about this and showed her my lab work and she told me to see so-and-so in the office, who fixed me up and so I went from a B on that lab to an A, it was about a 10% jump.

The same thing with the lab exam we had. I don't want to be a cookie-cutter student, so many people in the lab will punch numbers into the calculator and write down whatever it says. For example, we have a group of numbers that are

7.5

7.6

7.55

7.62

And my lab partner goes to take the average (while I'm busily working on something else) and tells me that the average is 7.63 and I just stare at him in disbelief. You can't have an average that is higher than any of the values we measured! So when I take an exam I will write down quite a bit and try to really show that I understand exactly what is going on. There was a simple question that asked for a true or false answer with a brief explanation. Well, I knew the answer was false, but just to be different (and see if Hamid would read it) I answered true but set up the conditions and explained it would be only true for this and this situation but would be false for this and this condition. Perhaps that was stupid of me and yes, I got the entire question wrong. He didn't read my explanation, just marked it off. When I get the exam back (he hadn't recorded them yet) then I'm going to have a talk with him about it, or somebody. Do they want me to just be a robot and answer exactly like everyone else does or actually think through my answers and give some sort of justification? Hamid wants cookie-cutter students, I guess I prefer dropped cookies in this case. :)

It's also funny, in lab we are supposed to take measurements, plot our readings on a graph and then measure the parts of the graph with a ruler and find the slope of the line that is plotted. The slope of this line should be about the constant of gravity in most cases. Well Hamid says our findings should be 9.8, of course I think he ignores the inaccuracy of using a ruler to measure the slope of a line, or the inaccuracy of the instruments we are using to measure. If someone gets around 9.4 he is not very happy and tells them to recalculate. Yet all people do in that case is just change some of the numbers around in their measurements with the ruler and voila! It's close to 9.8 and he's happy. I think he should be encouraging accuracy yes, but we are supposed to be showing our findings, not trying to get super close to some already known value. There have apparently been quite a few complaints about him. I think he tries very hard to be fair but he's just way too much “by the book.”

So that essentially has been school, most days I am on campus by 8:00 and I leave somewhere around 8:00 at night, which makes for really long days. I get home and try to get a few things done and then get in to bed about 11:00 and then am back up and going at 6:00. I honestly don't know how some people survive on only 6 hours, I feel horrible unless I get at least 7 and even then I'm pushing it. I can do less every once in a while but not every day! Though I wish I could so I could get more done.

I think I'll break this up into three posts at least, school life, other stories about school and around, and spiritual life.