(no subject)

"If the taxpayers are helping you, then you've got certain responsibilities to not be living high on the hog,"

Obama to detail further compensation limits

Damn straight. But then again, how many of the bailed-out CEOs really need a salary anyway? They'll cash in their stock options, maybe sell off one of their 4 Lamborghinis (which I'm surprised as hell I spelled right on the first try), and just keep on trekking. Still. Step in the right direction, considering what the Forbes list comes out with as salaries for the top CEOs every year. (Shift it to the teachers. The teachers!)

Microbiology test this morning? Quick. Should have been easy, had I been studying the easy stuff and not the hard shit that I didn't understand because he didn't really teach it. Lots of memorization of the history, which I've learned to expect to be the barely-skimmed-over part of these classes where it's not really relevant and have been unpleasantly surprised when this is not the case in two science classes here now.

And one question that just killed me--they wanted the name of the apparatus that lets you grow a continuous culture by feeding in and draining out a limiting nutrient that you then use to determine growth rate of a species. I looked at that last night and went "Oh, that's easy; I'll recognize it." Sure, I would have recognized it were it multiple choice. I remembered that it started with "chemo-". I could have danced around the word, bloody diagrammed it were it a short answer question. Nope. Fill in the blank, the stupidest test question type in existence. Seriously. Multiple choice gives you some context and lets you rely on recognition memory. Something with more room to answer lets you show that you know what you're talking about even if you forget the word. Can't come up with the exact term on fill in the blank and you're screwed. That's the one that I absolutely know I got wrong (I made up some "chemotron" thing that sounds more like a big technical piece of equipment than the "chemostat" it actually was).

And then a bunch more where I had spent too long working on trying to figure out what a south seeking magnetotactic bacterium in Flathead Lake would tend to do (questions from the book's online tests, which I mistakenly both prioritized higher since I don't have the actual book and spent much more time on since we covered the topics but not much of the actually questioned-on content, which should have been a clue in retrospect). So it was more "yeah, it's one of these. And this one sounds right. But not quite sure." The history stuff, mainly; the names I'd never heard before lecture and then didn't spend time reviewing because who really gives a damn about who did this first and when, so long as they did it?

*sigh.* Psychology next, which I'm hoping should be as easy as I'm expecting it to be, but as usual, I'm vaguely fearful that I'm entirely wrong. The bio test was all of 10 minutes max; I was out of the building by 8:20 when you add in my taking it and then going through it 2x more because I didn't want to turn it in first (the kid next to me looked like he finished it--turns out he just paused for a really long time whilst thinking--and just sat there, so I wondered if maybe we'd be grading it in class or something), so I got to my spot in the psych building (actually a different spot, because I brought my laptop cord today just in case and the spot with the tables that I usually use has no outlet) and had enough time to do this before I go through my notes again, as the class isn't until 10.

I started the third journal for my Hero and Quest class last night before realizing that she said "before Thursday" we must turn it in, which means that I can probably slide it under her door before my 9am on Thursday (hopefully she's not in before that), so I switched to the biology. That test is tomorrow as well, so maybe I can work the answers I'm going to write out for the study guide--this class appears to be very free response rather than the multiple choice/matching/"describe what myth's happening in this picture" of her class last semester, so I figured actually composing answers to all of the prompts is a good idea as she's mentioned pulling test stuff from there (though you never know to what extent teachers mean when they say that; could be anything from pulling questions word for word to their being related in topic and style)--into the reflective part of the journal. It's only got to be 2/3 as long as the others as there's no "talk about what happened in class" bit, as we had no class last week. The summary of the reading is going to require that I actually do some of the reading, though. The translation on the Internet Classics Archive of the Iliad isn't as good as the one I've been using by this Canadian professor that's also available online (he's translated a whole bunch of stuff and put it all out there for free, which is really awesome. I think I might email the guy and thank him at some point); I realized that I should have pointed it out to Dr. Johnson and asked what she thought of it in terms of, idk, accuracy and such, but it's a bit late now.

Should probably psych now. This is another one where I'm afraid there's going to be a whole load of names and dates I didn't memorize. There is a lot more history (more detailed, I guess) in the book than in the notes that I didn't really look at, which I'm hoping will be okay. I'm not planning on getting the book for this one at all, since I can pretty much get anything I need from his notes and the DSM (and, you know, AP Psych) and if really necessary, Chelsea (the cohab) is taking it as well and has the text sitting out on her desk that I can nab and quickly look things up in.