Life:Awesome

Andrei told me last week he wanted to start school early.  We usually start the week of Labor Day, which is also the week I start school.  As I was planning out his semester, he told me he wanted to get going.  These are his reasons:
- We’re playing Math Jeopardy (once) and he heard there would be candy involved.
- He saw me playing a game where Ghengis Khan has to conquer Asia and he was excited to play that (in 10 weeks)
- He wants to start reading Harry Potter.

Those are his reasons.  Usually I’d try to delay because I like a nice, organized 12 week semester, but I thought it would be good to start a few things early, and get him in the swing of things before I have to start studying all day also.

Plus we have a newish format this year and it will be good for him to get used to that.  Since I will be in and out and gone more often this year, I decided to let him be more responsible for when he does what.  Every other year we’d have a pretty strict schedule of almost every subject every day – all dictated by me.  This year it will be more in his hands.  Today I handed him his binder and showed him his weekly List.  It has all of his subjects listed, and divided into two columns – “With Mom” and “Alone”   I showed him that he can do them in whatever order he wanted, and when he wanted to do the “With Mom” things, he had to come get me or set a time when we could work together.  I also showed him how I sent him an email with links to all the videos or games he would be using that week.
He seemed excited that he got to have more control over his stuff.  I told him though that I would try and be hands off when it came to dictating how much or how little he would do each day – but if he wasn’t done by Friday afternoon, there would be no privileges Friday night until all of it was finished.

We’ll see, I suppose.  I’m tentatively hopeful…

This week I went to the university to talk to an advisor about registering for Algebra.  She asked to be reminded of my goals and I mentioned Calculus and Physics.  She started talking about how I could arrange this, when I stopped her and reminded her about my placement test.  I then implied how nice it would be if I could just skip Algebra altogether.  She looked at my scores again, asked me some questions about when my last math class was (um, 1997?), and thought for a moment before telling me she thought it would work, but we’d have to get the official signature from the math’s department head.     We went off to search for him, but he had left that day.  She said she’d talk to him tomorrow and give me a call.

The next afternoon, the math head called me up and asked more questions about my situation.  He was most concerned that I wouldn’t be able to keep up, since I had not taken an official college course.  But I assured him that I was very motivated and I would honestly teach it to myself, but I needed an official school to write on a college application.

He said yes!  Woohoo!

The only issue is that the university accidentally scheduled Calculus and Physics at the same time.  So I am choosing to take Calculus streaming from another campus.  I’m somewhat nervous about this, partially because the class is every day and I will have to work 2+ hours every single day to keep up, and it is definitely the hardest math I’ve ever taken.  Physics is on Monday and Wednesday mornings and then labs on Friday afternoon.  I will have a very, very busy semester.

I can’t decide how excited or how scared I should be…

I went to the local state college yesterday (I applied last week) to ask about a math placement test.  I’ve been studying all summer in order to test out of as much as I can.  The date they gave me was for next week, and we’ll be out of town, so that didn’t work.  Then the advisor said I could just take it privately for an extra $10.  Score!  Let’s do it right now!  Well, I didn’t have any calculator or pencils or lunch or anything, so I scheduled it for that afternoon, and then went off to study, vomit, and study some more.

I went back that afternoon and completely aced the test.  Just kidding.  I had quite a bit of trouble in the Algebra portion, which I had expected.  What I had not expected was that I would do so poorly in Algebra that I would test out of Trig, but still have to take College Algebra.  Boo  That was pretty depressing since it threw a wrench in my carefully laid out plans.  Plus then I looked at the tuition chart and it was almost double what I thought it was.  And with the move and all, we’re not exactly rolling in it right now.

So I decided that the college thing was not for me.  I would not be able to do it – it was not God’s ultimate plan for my life.

Then I remembered that I didn’t believe in that anymore.  I decided (previously) that I was just going to do this no matter what stood in my way.  Fate, I do what I want!  You don’t own me!  (commence sassy finger snapping).

I’m taking College Algebra in the fall.  I’m making myself take a class on Stanford’s Engineering Everywhere.  And I’m taking Intro to Physics at udacity.com.  And I’ll be damned if I’m going to let the crappy state school tell me I’m not awesome.