SPRING 2004 FINALS WORKRATE REPORT: Okay--I did pretty good. It went something like this:

HUMAN PHYSIOLOGY: B. This was the academic equivalent of a three-pointer from the corner as time expires for THE WIN! Or, at least, THE B! As I had the B+ average on my tests but, due to my customary lateness and occasional bouts of being in class in spirit only, my quiz grade was, how you say, not so hot. So by my calculations I had to get a 93 on the final to get that sweet B. I studied for four days straight and got.....got.....93.9! READ AND WEEP! But then I got my grade and it said C+. I wrote the professor and he politely informed me that I had, in fact, incorrectly calculated the number of points I needed. BUT--my e-mail got him to go over his calculations and he found 9 class participation points that had been denied me due to decimal point error. AND SO.....the B was had. By four ephemeral class participation points.

So it wasn't exactly a clutch shot. More of a ref gets hit, guy gets knocked out with steel chair, groggy ref counts out unconscious guy, foul play is apparently rewarded, other ref runs out and restarts the match, the gut who used the chair argues and gets rolled up in a flash 3-count thus serving justice kind of thing.

BIOSTATISTICS: A. This was the one that I thought, "Easy A," for. Our kindly old professor had spotted us points throughout the semester. None of the exams had been hugely difficult. Yet our kindly professor apparently thought to himself, "Well, I got three hours to play with for this here final. LET'S GO NUTS!" And so we were presented with a final that tested us on everything we were supposed to know, but that required calculations of a shall-we-say elaborate nature to complete. A level of difficulty was reached that had more to do with making things as long and painful as possible without going beyond what we knew. Hey, I did something right, obviously. But this was an endurance final.

PHYSIOLOGY LAB: A. The old writing skills pay off as I get 67 out of a possible 70 points on my lab report. This pushes me OVER THE TOP.

PHYSIOLOGY: B+. This is the scary class where nobody does well in strictly percentage terms and yet there is this wonderful thing called The Curve. The Curve.....forces us all to consider our grades as these quantum wave-form probability functions that do not take form as particulate matter until.....The Curve looks at them, and forces them into existence. Evidently The Curve was having a good day when it looked at my numbers.

There you go. I could do better--losing points due to absence is inexcusable. But I did all right with the things I had control over (e.g., how well I focused during studying) towards the end there. So--I mean--not doing the little things will keep you on that cusp between Above Average and Excellent. Way of the world.

"Workrate Report" copyright, as always, the DVDVR.