Higher Thinking with Max Marks

Last exam turned out to be easier than coming up with a metaphor for how easy an exam is.  The late night study session helped, though.  It’s always good to be certain you have all of the answers.

I went to sleep, got up around 6, had dinner with Sam, and then we napped again until midnight.  I’ve got less than eight hours before I’m on my way back to Toronto.

This whole term went far, far better than last year’s.  Looking at some of my grades that came back, I can’t say I’m happy with my average, but if I keep working hard for the next two and a half years, the three failed courses of last year won’t even touch me.

It was a little stressful this term, since in last year’s first term I was taking something like 25 credits, and this time I was taking 33, but at least I didn’t have to deal with any economics courses this time around.

It’s snowing really hard right now, I’m almost worried my flight will be delayed.  I’m not even sure how long it’ll take to get a cab over here.  I haven’t even packed yet.

I’m really quite terrible when it comes to travel.

Lots more studying ahead of me tonight.  As I predicted, I slept pretty late, so I won’t be very tired by the time my final comes around.

I know this isn’t the best way to approach an exam.  If this wasn’t my last one I wouldn’t even be considering this, but the risk of being a little tired after staying up all night isn’t quite as large to me as the risk of sleeping through my exam, which is quite likely.  I haven’t even woken up before 8:30 this term, and I’m not too good at rearranging my sleep clock on a whim.

I know, I can’t expect to have any employment opportunities in my future that are sympathetic to an inability to wake up before ten in the morning.  I’ve heard it all before.

Oh, well.  Back to studies.

Today marks the end of my totally uncommitted time.  I’m going to spend most of Monday studying for epistemology.

As I’ve said before, it’s not that I’m anywhere near bad at epistemology, it’s one of my better subjects, but lately I’ve felt like I’m not studying hard enough.  Sure, there are a lot of subjects I can get through without really trying, but just because something is easy doesn’t mean you can’t still get results from working hard at it.

I think because my dad made me feel obligated to go to university I didn’t really take my education seriously last year.  It was the same in high school.

I think I’ve written about this before, but I had a lot of problems with high school, both social and academic, and after getting expelled from my first high school, I kind of moved in and out of the whole school system until finally my parents let me just drop the whole thing for awhile.  My official story at the time was that I was doing my courses through correspondence, but I was as poorly committed to that as I was to the regular high school system.  So I spent something like six months doing absolutely nothing.  I sat in the attic of my mom’s house playing video games and exercising.  The only times I ever went outside were wednesdays, when I had breakfast with my father (my parents are divorced) and then saw my psychotherapist.

I won’t deny that I was a textbook example of a loser at the time.  But spending six months out of high school was probably the best thing that happened to me.  I mean, up until then, I despised school.  It was something forced upon me since before I had long-term memory, and the way it was always presented to me is “Here are a bunch of people who aren’t your family, don’t love you like your family, don’t give you food or shelter like your family, but they have absolute authority over you.”

In spite of having a pretty screwed up family, I think I have pretty strong family values.  I do what my parents ask because I know they have my best interests as their main priority.  If my parents were ever to hurt me, I know it would be as a result of some kind of misunderstanding.  The authority represented in teachers never gave me this impression, especially since at least two thirds of my Ontario public school teachers, simultaneously bloated with arrogance over the almighty power of their workers’ union and burning with rage over Mike Harris’ conservative government, were concerned more with their paychecks and pensions than the growth of their students.  I always felt pushed aside in school, and the “authority” given by teachers seemed to serve only to assist them in pushing me aside.

Anyway, I didn’t like being forced to be in school, so once returning to high school was my own decision, it put me in a distinctly different position: If I did poorly, I was no longer making statements about my own objections to being forced into jumping through hoops by random authority figures, I was simply hindering my own personal goals.  My grades improved drastically just from this.

I remember what I thought at that time in my life, when I was sixteen years old, and I only had something like six high school credits out of a necessary thirty to graduate.  I recalled my middle school’s principal in eighth grade coming in to make a speech about what highschool was like.  He would repeat this phrase “sixteen credits by sixteen years of age:  If you have not accomplished this goal, you are more than fifty percent likelier to drop out of high school” followed by a long speech about how people without high school diplomas in Canada can’t even get jobs at MacDonald’s.  According to my principal, then, I was not only doomed to fail high school, but I was destined to be begging on the streets for money in ten years.  I hated that principal.

Not that I hate all teachers and principals from my past.  Without the support of the principal of my last high school, I wouldn’t be here, and certainly not this soon if at all.

In any case, I’m remembering this at the end of this term with the determination to take the rest of my time here at UBC more seriously.  I don’t need six months away from here to learn the same lesson all over again.