Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

So, after much hassling from my parents and my dear roommate, I went in to talk to my physics teacher and I went “So, it’s come to my attention that I’m way too ADHD to be getting as much out of this class as you seem to think I should be, do you have any tips.”  Because, you know, sitting in a classroom watching a teacher derive equations on the board for an hour doesn’t play great with attention issues and a total inability to sit still.  It also causes problems on exams with a strict time limit for obvious reasons.  And like it’s not that uncommon an issue so, foolishly, I assumed that he would have literally any help at all to offer me.  

He suggested that I make sure I’ve done the reading before every class, in detail, so that I won’t have to pay as much attention in class since I’ll ‘already know the material.’  Because clearly reading between twenty and fifty pages of extremely dense physics textbook is going to go so much better.  CLEARLY the best solution to attention deficit problems.  OBVIOUSLY.  The more fool ME for not thinking of it, right?  Who wouldn’t think of that as the obvious solution to ADHD?  God, Moran, what are you even doing with your life if you’re not meticulously doing the reading for everything?  Because God forbid I realize that doing the reading is literally useless to me, even in classes I give even a single iota of a fractional fuck about as anything except a mandatory requirement.

Since I’m probably abusing sarcasm at this point: I just want to punch him in his smug asshole face.  Really hard.  A lot.  Also the next time he laughs at me for not getting something I might actually flip a table.

jaclcfrost:

a list of emotions i feel frequently

• no
• fall out boy
• 4 am
• lying face down on the floor
• no shirt
• what

(Source: greelin, via cthulhu-with-a-fez)

usbdongle:

turkish-delightful:

detached1026:

turkish-delightful:

How could you be against free college. Like if I think about student loans for more than a few minutes I think about jumping off a cliff have some pity damn

Because hundreds of thousands of people have already paid for their tuition. Should they be reimbursed? It’s not fair to the people who have already paid/ are paying for college. That’s why.

Yeah I love thinking how my kids are gonna cry and have panic attacks because of the heavy student loans they’re gonna have just because they want to go to a good school. Yeah I really want them to suffer just like I did bc yknow I paid why should they have it any easier than me?? I don’t want America to be better than I found it. Fuck future generations.

i dont think we should use cars because it’s not fair to the people who had to travel via horseback. should they be resurrected with necromancy and allowed to apply for a drivers license?  think logically here

(Source: pinky-and-clyde, via ailleee)

reynardreblogs:

aspiringdoctors:

coffeeforcollege:

madamebadger:

A story that may have relevance for others, or then again, maybe not:

When I was in college, about ten or so years ago, I was a history major. I wanted to learn to dance, so I joined a swing dance club on campus. To my surprise, this club had about twice as many men as women (in high school, the last time I’d tried dancing, the ratio had gone the other way–lots of girls, and boys only that you could drag by their ears).

But apparently, there had been some kind of word spread specifically to the STEM guys that dance was a way that they could meet girls.

So anyway. I joined the swing dance club, and met a few guys. And at one point, when socializing with the guys outside of dance class, one of them asked me what my research was on. (I had already established that I was an honors history student doing a thesis, just as he had established that he was an honors… I’m not sure if he was CS or Math, but it was one of those.)

So I gave him the thumbnail sketch of my research. Now, to be clear, an honors senior thesis, while nothing like what a graduate student would do, was still fairly in-depth. I had to translate primary sources from the original late-Classical Latin. (My professor said, basically, that while there were plenty of translations of my source material, that I’d only be able to comfortably trust them if I had at least made a stab at a translation of my own. And he was right.) And there was so much secondary material, often contradictory, that I had been carefully sorting through.

But I was able to sift it into a three-sentence summary of my senior thesis work, you know, as one does.

So I gave him that summary, and then asked–since he was also an undergraduate senior doing an honors thesis–what his research was on.

“Oh,” he said, “you wouldn’t understand it.”

Reader, I went home in a frothing rage. Because I had thought we were playing one game–a game of ‘let’s talk about what we’re passionate about!’– and he had been playing another game, which was, one-upsmanship. I had done my best to give a basically understandable brief of my research–and he had used that against me. As if my research, my painstaking translation, my digging through archives and ILLs of esoteric works, my reading of ten thousand articles in Speculum (yes, the pre-eminent medievalist journal in North America is called Speculum, I’m sorry, it’s hilarious/sad but also true), and then my effort to sum it up for him, was nothing. Because his research into some kind of algorithm or other was just too complex for my tiny brain to conceive of. Because I just couldn’t possibly understand his work.

Now, the important note here is that the person I went home to was my senior year roommate. She was a graduate student–normally undergrads and graduate students couldn’t be roommates, but we’d been friends for years, and the tenured faculty-in-residence used his powers for good and permitted us to be roommates that year. Anyway. My senior year roommate was basically… in retrospect I think possibly an avatar of Athena. She was six feet tall, blonde, attractive in a muscular athletic way, a rock climber and racquetball player, sweet but sharp, extremely socially awkward, exceptionally kind even when it cost her to be kind, and an incredibly brilliant computer science major who spent most of her time working on extremely complicated mathematical algorithms. (Yes, I was a little in love with her, why do you ask? But she was as straight as a length of rope, and is now happily married, and so am I, so it worked out.)

(Still, yes, she is my mental image of Athena, to this day.)

Anyway, I came home in a frothing rage to my roommate, the Athena avatar. And I said, “He made me feel like such an idiot, that I could sum up my research to him but his research was just too smart for stupid little me.”

And she shut her book, and smiled at me, with her dark eyes and her high cheekbones and her bright hair, and said, “If he can’t explain his research to you, then he’s not nearly as smart as he thinks he is.”

Now I hesitated, because I’d be in college long enough to have sort of bought into the ridiculous idea that if you couldn’t dazzle them with your brilliance, you should baffle them with your bullshit. But she said, “Look, I’ve been doing work on computer science algorithms that have significantly complicated mathematical underpinnings. What do I do?”

And I said, “Genetic algorithms–that is, self-optimizing algorithms–for prioritization, specifically for scheduling.”

“Right,” she said. “You couldn’t code them because you’re not a computer scientist or a mathematician. But you can understand what I do. If someone can’t explain it like that, it isn’t a problem with you as a person. It’s a problem with them. They either don’t understand it as well as they think they do–or they want to make you feel inferior. And neither is a positive thing.”

So. There.

If you are looking into something and have a question, and someone treats you like an idiot for not understanding right away… here is what I have to say: maybe it isn’t you who is the idiot.

ATTN: ALL COLLEGE STUDENTS EVERYWHERE PLS READ

HEED ATHENA AVATAR’S WORDS BBCAKES EVERYWHERE.

As an academic working in academia: this this this. Never buy into the elitist bullcrap of ‘oh, you wouldn’t understand.’ And never perpetuate that crap yourself, either out of pretension or even simple laziness. If you can’t explain it to a ten-year-old, go back and hit the books again cause you’re not there yet.

(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)

snorlaxatives:

coldwarmthandthebittertaste:

snorlaxatives:

no shade but what’s the point of spending thousands and thousands of dollars to go to college if you’re just gonna ditch every other class like just save your money and stay home my dude

This. Like I have a friend who’s financial aid covers her tuition, enough to the point where she actually gets a lot of money back, and it even covers her textbooks. And then she’s skipping every day and failing classes. I mean she is literally getting a free college education, at a state university, something many kids would kill for.

that literally made me cringe reading it i’m so upset

(via starwarsisgay)

autumnalequinox:

people talk a lot about how public schooling in america is a really fucked up system but i think we should also maybe talk about universities too. like why is being stressed out to a breaking point part of the college experience? why is it accepted and expected that college students will often go without sleep in order to get their work done? i don’t understand why we embrace the idea that college students should be stressed. i think the amount of homework assigned is absurd and unnecessary. it does nothing productive for learning. it just burns students out and makes us lose our drive. and on top of that, we have to pay thousands and thousands of dollars for this torment lmao it’s so ridiculous and honestly kind of sickens me

THIS.  I took this weekend mostly off from homework because I analytically know that I don’t have too much and it’s making me absolutely sick with anxiety, even though I really needed the break.

(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)