Educational lessons
...gh the whole class without having a textbook. Come to think of it, I don’t even know how I passed the course. I think I did this because “senioritis” had hit me. I don’t think I had a care in the world at that time. When I look back at what I had done, I had already started digging my higher educational grave. I passed the class, but never once thought about my grade point average (G.P.A.). Just the other day I checked my G.P.A. online and I realized that my low grade in that course from “goofing around” continues to haunt me. In the Fall of 2004, I attended U.I.W. as a freshman and one of the classes I was taking was Calculus. Calculus is one of those subjects where you have to practice what you learned in class that same day. If you wait until one day later, chances are you are going to forget the material the instructor covered. There were times where I wouldn’t open my book because the teacher I had wouldn’t pick the homework up and, of course, my laziness “kicked in” and caught up with me. I ended up dropping the course with a “W.” Last semester my major was Pre-Pharmacy; this semester as of right now, I don’t have a major. In the fall of 2004 while I was taking my Calculus class I was also enrolled in Chemistry I. Just as Calculus was, it is one of those courses that require immediate practice for reinforcement. My Chemistry teacher was sort of like the one I had for Calculus except she differed in that she assigned homework only every now and then. Tony and Aaron were enrolled with me in this class as well. Instead of working together to get a good grade, we would always find something else to do besides studying. We were mostly in U.I.W.’s game room in Marion Hall playing ping pong or shooting pool. We acted as if we were still in high school; we didn’t care much about anything. All three of us realized that we had, unfortunately, set ourselves back in our educational journeys to our future careers. Come to think of it we were acting just as Ted Richard whom Mike Rose talks about. “Ted didn’t do all that well in school- baseball and parties and testing the courage he’d speculated about took up his time.” As of right now in the Spring semester of 2005, I am taking another Calculus class with a different tea...