10 Years After

The Science Of Selling Yourself Short

I actually got up and made it to my bio lab this morning. It's only one day a week, Thursdays, at 9:15 and It's suppose to last until 11:05, right before my History of the West; which I won't have today due to the instructor going to New Orleans for a confrence.

Class was strange. The instructor is a grad student and someone I noticed yesterday sitting off to the side in the Bio lecture. He looks to be in his mid 30s- sort of scruffy looking with a goatee and a short ponytail. He mentioned that he was interestedin botany.

Anyways, that's not the strange part. In class we had to form groups to start with the experiments. First was one where we will grow seeds and note the impact of fertilizer on their growth. Four seeds receive fertilizer and four, the control, do not.

The second experiment was where we measured biceps and then entered the data (bicep size and gender) into a spreadsheet in excel. The point was suppose to be that we would look at the standard deviation and be amazed that male and female sizes are not all that different. However, and this is the strange part, the instructor didn't know how to get excel to compute the standard deviation.

Instead of being in class for 2 hours it lasted about 30 minutes. He said that he'd figure out how to do it before the next class session. (Which is fine, I still need to pick up a lab manual.)

I'm over in the library. After checking mail I checked to see what I need to do for my online World Civ class. The previous post on the message board by the instructor asking us what world history meant to our education has disappeared. There is, though, an online quiz that I need to complete before Sunday night.

These online quizes are a bit strange in that one can take them over and over again (each time it'll generate different questions) until one is satisfied with the grade for that quiz. Plus, you get to use your book, whatever notes, etc. while you take the quiz (or test) since you are doing them from your homepc or where ever.

Also, I have the same instructor for World Civ that I do for East Asian history and, strangely, the module for the first two chapters of the World Civilization class read as if they were lecture notes from yesterday's East Asian History class.

Now I'm off to the bookstore to see if I can find a lab manual. (Or, perhaps, I can borrow one from someone in my group and just make some photocopies :)