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So. Math. My teacher is a whore. End of story.

Okay, not quite. We'll go through the reasons she's a whore, just for fun.

10 Reasons Why My Calculus Teacher is a Whore.

1) She made me take a test with no warning after I had been absent for several days when she was teaching the stuff and had already arranged to take it another day.

2) She wouldn't give me a minute to look over my notes before I took the test.

3) This resulted in me getting a 71% because of my not knowing the formulas, when I would have known them had I a) been able to take it the day I had arranged, as I would have made time to study beforehand and/or b) had a moment to look over the notes before the test. Just the formulas alone lost me 15%. I would probably have been able to have gotten an A had I had time to study all of it, as I need very little time to learn this kind of stuff.

4) I also had to take two quizzes. And didn't get any of the quizzes/test/exams back before taking the next one. So a couple of the formulas that I actually thought I knew, I had wrong and didn't know it, resulting in me putting the same wrong answers down for all three exams.

5) One of those quizzes was a quiz purely over formulas. And again, she wouldn't give me a minute to look over my notes before I took the quiz. And I took that one right after taking the test, so I had had no time (or reason, I thought, as the test was over) to study or realize that I had been doing some of the stuff wrong.

6) She's got me down as having zeros on some homework that I know that I did and I'm pretty sure I wasn't absent when she checked it. There's no reason that I can come up with for her having zeros for those assignments.

7) She didn't tell me that I was responsible for an assignment that was done in class on a day I was absent (as in class things tend not to need made up in most classes unless they're huge), didn't even mention it, and as such, I have another zero.

8) Way back on an earlier quiz, I misread a problem to be the x root of some stuff instead of what it actually was, x times the square root of aforementioned stuff. Not only would she not just give me the points because I did the xth root problem correctly, even though it wasn't the actual question, but she wouldn't even just call me up there when she noticed it and tell me that I had read it wrong and ask me to do the real problem for her (because it was an easy problem and it was obvious that I had misread it). Nope. Just a big negative 4 points next to that problem.

9) She asked our class on Friday what she could do to punish her freshmen classes, as "God, [she] hates those kids". She spent a long time talking about how much she hates them without giving any particular reason for aforementioned hatred. And expressed desire to smack them and things. She mentioned already giving them tons of extra homework, but that they haven't seemed to catch on that that's punishment. I'd bet her money that quite a few of them have. And I'd go double or nothing that those kids that have noticed are the ones that aren't doing anything to deserve it. I despise teachers that punish whole classes for the antics of some, particularly because I've been in the not-some group (though often in the minority) many times.

10) She's never happy with the amount of talking going on in our class. This one seems rather trivial, but it's one that a lot of people have mentioned. The people in my calculus class tend not to talk a lot. She has said repeatedly that this silence freaks her out. Yet on some days when we happen to be talking amongst ourselves more than usual at all (usually Fridays or some such when nobody feels like doing work), she gets naggy about there being too much talking and not enough math. Lady, you're the one who on every other day says that we're too quiet. And there's plenty of math going on and the talking isn't loud or disruptive to the people that aren't talking and are concentrating fully on their work. It's crazy.

Yeah. And even other teachers don't like her. So I vote that she leaves a month early to have her baby (meaning last Wednesday) and stays away the whole rest of the year. I count myself crazy lucky that I happened to get her in the year that she's going on maternity leave in late November/December (though screwed as I have to have a sub for at least 6 weeks in the last few months before the AP and IB tests) because I won't have to have her for that much more time. I'd like to switch teachers permanently, but I don't think that there's another calc class at the same hour and I'm taking enough specialized classes that are only offered one specific hour of the day that moving around my schedule is all but impossible. Still, even though I've heard that the other regular (not the substitute) calculus teacher is boring as hell, I think I'd rather have her over one that's a bitch and unfair.

I've got to convince myself to just suck it up and go up there and tell her to give me credit for those homework assignments that she has zeros for. And ask if I can do that in-class thing and beg to maybe be allowed to retake one of those quizzes (even just to average it with my old score), though I doubt those will happen. But I really hate going up and talking to teachers and explaining things and such. And I find sometimes I'd rather have a zero on something than bring attention to the fact that I hadn't yet turned it in/talked to her about it/done well on it.

But this is killing my grade in there majorly. Like 66% for the quarter so far, majorly. I've never had a D. This isn't happening to me. If I can get the grade up to a highish C and do well on the final, I'll probably be able to pull a B for semester. And I've got to get at least a B for semester. Honestly, I don't know what I'll do if I don't. I'm already majorly freaking out about my grade in there right now to the point that every time I even think of anything math related that brings me to thinking about calculus, I'm on the verge of tears. 'Tis bad. And I should have fixed all of this earlier which makes it all pretty much my fault.

(no subject)

But on a happier note, I've been a keyboard playing fool this weekend. Just picking out stuff right and left. I got (technically, the family got) this keyboard for Christmas last year or the year before and when it was in the front room, everybody played around on it a lot, but it got moved to the basement where there's no place near it to plug it, so I didn't really mess with it anymore except for occasionally. I decided that I wanted to play it because there's some commercial with just the piano into bit of Vanessa Carlton's "A Thousand Miles" playing a lot on TV and I wanted to learn how to play that. So I brought an extension cord thing down there to plug it in and just hummed that bit over and over (usually just in my head, but sometimes out loud) and picked it out. So I can play the intro to that and the main piano bit really well now.

And then my brother came down and heard me playing that right after I got it and challenged me to figure out the Voyager theme song. Which was really hard as I didn't know it well enough to sing it so I had to just have it on repeat on the TV. This meant that I couldn't figure out just one section at a time, but had to wait through the whole rest of the theme to get back to the part that I was working on unless I wanted to take my hands off of the keys to fast-forward and risk losing the notes. And then I would forget what I had just figured out while listening to the rest of the theme while waiting for it to get back to the spot. And I couldn't slow it down to get it like I could when I was humming the song to myself. I worked on that one for a while and got a large chunk of it, but still not all (as I didn't realize that it was getting really late and when I did, I decided to just go to bed as I'm still not quite over that cold).

And in trying to figure out the Voyager theme, I managed to stumble across the notes for the SG-1 theme, so I fiddled with that for a few minutes before going back to Voyager (because that was going to bug me until I got at least one of the themes).

And today I picked out the basic vocal/piano theme of "Seasons of Love" from memory. And played around with picking out the actual piano part, but then left to go with my parents to buy a new van. (Which is pretty nice, but there's no rear air and the monitor of the DVD player in it quit working exactly one mile away from the place we bought it after signing everything. Which I'm not standing for. As the DVD player was pretty much what sold me on the van. We're supposed to take it back to them to get it inspected on Monday and I'm going to make them fix that. Rear air I could possibly live without if both front windows and the rear vents were all the way open or the front air conditioning vents were pointed straight back at me, but jipping me on the DVD player? No, sir. Especially if my grandparents expect us to drive down to Texas for Christmas this year.)

And the van buying took a really long time (but there was a machine there that for only 25 cents gave you a cup of really good hot chocolate) but I'm glad I went because without me, they would have gotten themselves jipped on the wireless infrared headphones and DVD player remote that are supposed to come with it but weren't with the car. And might have decided to trade in this old van that we don't really drive much as it sucks gas but drives amazingly and is really big and comfortable for the nothing that they were going to give us.

So then I came back and was fiddling with Rent music again and my brother came down and popped in my Rent DVD and I just played along. Because once you get a hang of the key and get your fingers on the majorly used notes, if you know how the song goes, it's pretty easy to figure out.

Though all of this would have been so much easier on my viola. I'm so bad at figuring out what keys go with which notes. And I've got pretty rudimentary technique. Viola playing is pretty much muscle memory for me; it's become almost instinctual that this finger position is an F-sharp and so is this one on the other string and if I shift up it's this finger position and so on. While with the keyboard as I've not ever seriously played it often enough to become really good, so I'm like "Okay. I think that one's an A. *presses key, listens* Yup, that's an A. Count up one, two, three. D. There we go."

I also just practiced random arpeggios, trying to get my fingers a little better at pianoing, and I'm not atrociously slow. Though the whole left hand playing one thing, right hand playing another thing is still pretty much eluding me for anything more complex than simple chords (like no more than two notes) on one hand while the other's doing stuff.

Still. Fun.