So. I had my infamous practical midterm Tuesday night. I hate tests that are late in the day, especially after a day where I worked from 9-1, did my internship from 1-3:30, then jogged over to campus (with heavy backpack) to make it for the 4:00 test.
The good news is that I knew exactly what he wanted us to do. The bad news is I couldn’t get it all to work. Some of the time I had to stop and make myself breathe. I turned in a pretty awful looking webpage, but at least I got a webpage to exist! OK, so it didn’t link to the response page like it was supposed to. And it was really ugly (I decided to make it blue and yellow because, well you know, this is the University of MICHIGAN!) and it didn’t look just like it was supposed to. But he knows how hard this is for me, and frankly I’m glad to have ANYTHING to turn in.
I was nervous, hands shaking sometimes, telling myself to calm down, got about 2/3 of it in some sort of sorry shape and feel OK. He says he’ll have our grades back to us by noon tomorrow, and that it will likely either be 100 if it’s all there or 50 or 30 points. I don’t really care, 30 points is fine by me! We shall see.
I’m just glad it’s over. But today’s lecture, about “object oriented” code and methods and instances and such made my head swim. And of course he says this week’s homework is easy. But he’s said that every week, even the weeks I spend over 12 hours on it. I reminded him of that in class today and he laughed, and said that for MOST people this week’s homework would be easy. I told him he’d probably be hearing from me over the weekend.
Sigh.
Change Is Hard 
March 12, 2008 at 9:57 pm
I’m glad you can stop worrying about it. What’s done is done and I’m sure you did fine. When I took Ruby with Hans he did the same thing – always saying how easy it was. Maybe it is easy, relative to the programming world, but for those of us who it doesn’t come easy to, well, it just feels like they are condescending to us or making us feel like we are dumb. I’m sure they are just trying to reassure us, but they could be a little more selective in their vocabulary. That said, I do hope that this week’s homework is truly easy so you can have a break.
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March 12, 2008 at 10:27 pm
This comes up at work a lot, somebody saying something is “easy” to implement. I always point out that easy doesn’t always mean quick.
Writing your name is easy. Writing your name on 5,000 pieces of paper is also easy.
Seems like you have a pretty decent relationship with your professor and that has to make your challenges a little more bearable. It could be so much worse. It could be Lala A(ca)damic…
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