Only 60 more hours to go...

My first four hours of chemistry are behind me now. Saturday I arrived at Ivy Tech early, around 7:40, hoping to get my parking permit and ID updated before class. As it turns out, that place is a ghost town on Saturdays. Scrap that plan. I went to my third floor classroom a little early and got a good seat facing front and in a corner. This is not a regular desk classroom, though. We spend the entire four hours in a laboratory. It's only a little intimidating.

My teacher, who prefers to be called Millsium, said I looked familiar. I hope that is a good thing. He taught at Gibson Southern for 42 years, so I'm not sure how I would know him. Despite his somewhat lame jokes and penchant for talking too much and saying things that are borderline offensive, I think I'm going to like him. He not only has an obvious love and respect for chemistry, he has a passion for teaching it to people who haven't got a clue. He has a conversational style and does not assume too much about what we know.

We spent a long time just discussing Observation, Law, Hypothesis and Theory. I must admit, I got a little confused about Law. We then went through the power point slides that I am comfortable with thanks to last semester with Dr. Murphy. I think I was the only one in class who printed off the slides for taking notes. Rookies.

During the 10 minute break, I ran back downstairs to see about that parking permit and ID again. Still, no one was there except one security guard who pointed out the parking permit form I could turn in to the business office. But there's no one in the business office. I guess I'm coming back during the week.

The second half of class was lab time. We talked ad nauseum about safety and signed a paper promising to be good kids. Our outfits were inspected and given pass and fail grades. My coat and tennis shoes failed. Too bad on the shoes. It's pretty much all I have. And I wouldn't need the coat if it weren't 50 degrees in the building. We were also told we needed to acquire before next week a lab coat and safety goggles. So when you see an Ivy Tech sign bragging about how you can get a degree for less than $3000, don't believe them.

We managed to squeeze in some time do some actual lab work...sort of. We measured our textbooks so we could discuss significant numbers. He asked us to work together. Yeah, right. We don't start talking to each other until around the third class.

We then went over the homework. This was not what I expected. We had hardly anything to do outside of class for anatomy. I spent lots of time reading and rereading and doing the chapter questions but none of it was technically an assignment. But in this class we had 4 different lab sections to read and fill out, chapter one to read, 16 chapter questions to do, and several extra pages of stuff to review. I'm not so much whining about doing it. I would have done it anyway. I just don't like being told to do it and I especially don't like that other people are doing it. I count on people's natural laziness to make me look good.

Sorry this post is so long. I'll cut it short and tell you about my mid-week return trip later.