Will I Have to Take It?

It’s hard to believe, but tomorrow is my last day of regular classes this semester. It has gotten here none too soon! This has been an exhausting semester for me, in more ways than one.

Economics: Statistics—I entered this class with a lot of trepidation—and with good cause, I believe. The first week or two, I thought, “Mean, median—I can handle this.” In the next two or three weeks we branched out into standard deviation and z-scores. I began to get a little nervous. Then we began to study Probability Theory, and I began longing for the ease of z-scores and residuals. Since then we’ve delved into the Central Limit Theorem, Confidence Intervals, Statistical Significance, T-distribution, and more. It’s enough to make a person beg for mercy.

There are several things that annoy me about my statistics class:

1. The first, and greatest, annoyance is my ability to fall asleep in class. I started the semester out with a sleep deficiency and don’t think that I’ve managed to catch up yet. With accounting being so demanding on my time, I find myself averaging less than five hours of sleep on nights before a quiz, which happen all too frequently in this class. I cram into the early morning hours, and then get up extra early to cram some more before class. With stats being my first class of the day on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I wonder what ever ailed me when I chose to take a stats class at 8 a.m. I have firm convictions against sleeping in class and never thought that I’d be one to do it, but that matters not to The Sandman. I carry a bottle of No-Doz in my backpack to aid in the fight against snoozing.
2. Another annoyance is the girl that sits next to me in class. During class (when she chooses to come) she sits and sends text messages pretty much all during class, except when she pauses to copy something the prof has written on the board. If I didn’t have a conscience, I would have kept her phone the morning that she left it lying on the chair in between us and I found it on my way out of class. I do my best to ignore it, but some days (most) my ignorer is out of commission.
3. You could almost set your watch by the third annoyance. On the first morning of class, the prof asked us to arrive in class on time. In the event that we do arrive late, he asked that we slip in quietly and sit in the back. Well, there is one guy that consistently arrives five minutes late and insists on sitting in the front of the room at the table that is the farthest from the door. He used to be able to get there on time on mornings we had quizzes, but he can’t even do that anymore.

I do enjoy the prof in the class. Mr. L is a native Ukrainian. I enjoy listening (when I’m not fighting sleep) to his perspective on American culture. He married an American and has a two and a half year old daughter and a several month old daughter. He too arrives in class sleep deprived. He came to class one morning and told us that he never believed in the theory that a full moon makes people do crazy things—until both of his daughters woke up at 4:00 a.m. that morning for no reason whatsoever and refused to go back to sleep. From him I have also learned that I must not be “intellectually curious.” He launched into a side lecture as an explanation about something that we won’t be learning in this class that went way over my head. He ended it by saying that those of us that are “intellectually curious” could look further into it. I guess I’m not.

I’ve trying so hard to do well in that class. If I can make an average of 9 out of 10 points on all of my quizzes, I won’t have to take the CUMULATIVE FINAL. My performance was less than ideal on several of them. I even resorted to attending his Thursday night class one week, just so I could hear the material a second time and hoped for better soakage and thereby a better quiz score. It actually worked because I got my best score on the following quiz. I wish I had thought of doing that earlier in the semester.

I now find myself in a precarious position. I’ve only one more quiz in that class, and I will have to make 8.72 out of 10 points to be exempt from the final. I could just weep! I’m so scared that I won’t be able to do it. Needless to say, I have been petitioning the Father on a rather frequent basis. If I have to take that final, I’m sunk. I don’t think I can go back in time and remember how to perform all those calculations and interpret them as they need to be interpreted.

A person can only take so much...