Good and Bad Things

[theyellowhobbit]

+I spent yesterday afternoon watching Buffy and then Degrassi with currentlee
+Knitted with AD
-Got stuck on campus
There was going to be no bus until 7:15, and it was 6:55, so I decided to
take the red line to the green line. Unfortunately, the train I got on was
out of order, and we all got off at Central. We spent a lot of time waiting
in the train in the tunnel before we got to Central. I should have gotten off
at Harvard when it was taking too long to get going.
-No real dinner
+/-Buffy was good, but was very, very angsty

The end, where Angel gets his soul back and then Buffy stabs him in order
to close the portal? WTF? She could have easily just cut his hand and
pressed it against the statue or something. I'm not sure whether or not she
believed it was actually Angel in that instance. I partially blame Xander
as well, for being a selfish ass and not telling Buffy that Willow was
trying the ritual again.

I actually cried at this scene. I normally don't cry when I read books or
watch TV shows/movies with really sad parts, but in this case I did.
We had technical difficulties during "Becoming (Part 1)" so I ended up
having to take the 12:45 bus home instead of the normal 12:15 I take. So I
got no sleep last night.
+I got my midterm from Nasrallah's class today. I got a B- on question 1 and
an A- on question 2, for a total of a B/B+. My reaction?
1.I'm not surprised with the first question, as I had no time left to
revise it or anything, and I'm bad at the scholarly reflection papers and
this was a question in the same style.
2.Question 2 had a comment about how my TF really liked the part where I
use the logic from Deuteronomy 22 (the whole scenario of what happens if a
betrothed woman gets raped), and said I should have talked about it more.
Except my paper already had gone over the page limit, so I couldn't have
added more. But still, shiny A-!
3.B/B+? Whenever I see slashy grades, I always think that there's a reason
why God invented numbers. Seriously. Just calculate it to a 87 or an 86.5
or whatnot. That would actually mean something to me.
-It took forever to get home today because someone got injured on the bus when she was exiting.
+I looked at the syllabus and even Dr. Machinist is cancelling his day before Thanksgiving class. Thus I can go home on Wednesday morning (since Tuesday night is still Buffy night).

I'm a bit apprehensive about getting my Idrimi paper back today, assuming I indeed get it back. I'm happy about the A- on the Nasrallah essay, and that gives me reassurance that I actually am smart and can handle grad school, I've just had a series of bad papers, and it's an unusually long streak for me, since normally I'll only have one or 2 bad papers a year, scattered out among different classes. Unfortunately, the Idrimi paper is one of those bad papers. It only counts for 10% of our grade, though.

We also got the assignment for the long paper. At first it said that we should be working with a primary source in the original, but then he sent out a correction that we could use a translated source since there is no language requirement for the class. Which is good because the original assignment scared the heck out of me, since I barely know Modern Hebrew at this point (I've forgotten a lot) and I know no Biblical Hebrew. And I like the other sources better than the Biblical stuff, since they're new and exotic to me, and also I don't have to worry about giving a non-academic interpretation since I'm used to reading the Biblical texts through a religious lens, and I don't have to deal with whether or not the Torah is true in my paper. So translations open up all the possible topics to me. Yay for not having a language requirement in this class. I may try to use a German secondary source if applicable, so I can impress Dr. Machinist and show that I'm working hard, even if I'm an uneducated first year grad student who handed in a very bad paper on Idrimi that was written under stress and with no time.

I should be getting back the paper from Shaye Cohen's class tomorrow (except that I handed it in a week and a half (extended) late, so he may not have gotten to it). I expect a good grade on it, since we just had to discuss a topic intelligently, and I did that, and I insulted Neusner's scholarship, and I had shiny figures (in color!). I should be getting my midterm back next week (I'm hoping for a low B on that, and I should have been able to get an A. And it's worth 25% of my grade. This is what I get for not studying enough.)

Hopefully I will end the semester with decent grades in all my classes, though right now I don't know if this is actually a possibility.

Comments

[masteraleph.livejournal.com]

"3.B/B+? Whenever I see slashy grades, I always think that there's a reason
why God invented numbers. Seriously. Just calculate it to a 87 or an 86.5
or whatnot. That would actually mean something to me."

There's a good reason to set it up as a B/B+: it's called fudging. Using a "slashy" grade allows the teacher to use a range of grades when they give you the final grade. If you've shown very good work by the end of the term, the teacher can count it for a higher score so as not to hurt you. Also, if they computer your grade and it gives a range of, say, 90-92, they can choose what they want within that. It's frustrating as a student, I understand, but it's useful as an instructor to make sure that students get the grade they deserve.