Darkwand's Alcove

Adventures in Freshman Calculus Class

Well, FragileKitty, my loving wife, thought that it might be entertaining if I shared with you something from my early college years…I went to what was at the time a top-10 school for Astrophysics, and usually one of the ways that they break in the new freshmen and make them pay their dues is the first semester calculus class. Which is *intentionally* scheduled at 6:15am, I believe. So, this is in the North, ok? So I am getting up a 5:15-5:30am in the morning and walking the better part of a mile to class with these –45 degree wind-chill to a *calculus* class, ok? It's not like I'm going through all this and there's sex on the other end, it's calculus. It’s already hell, and I haven’t even walked in the door yet! Well, I may or may not tell more stories about having lived in that city, but that’s for another time. So, what happens? I get in there, and there is this very young guy, whose name is Zhang, who I quickly find out is a *grad student*. The PhD percentage on campus is 99%, and I am being taught one of the most important courses in the curriculum by a grad student. Whose name is *Zhang*, ok? Percentage chance that this fucker is going to be able to speak good English? 1%. After 2 or 3 days of trying to figure out what this fucker was saying, I’m like, “This is not good. I need to see if I can transfer to another section.” So, I do, yes, there is one section left that’s open. So, I get in there, and the first thing this guy says is, *in a heavy Russian accent*, “Hello. My name is Leonid TOLMUTZCH (pronounced: Toll-much and he says this part a bit louder and sharper) and zis is ze study de ze calculus (except he pronounces it: cow-ku-lus). I was like, “Shit, I’m doomed”. So, I went back over to Zhang’s section, and there I rotted for the entire fucking semester. I don’t understand how you are supposed to learn calculus like this. My father went to Lehigh, and he told me about various means that they had of weeding out the people who were not meant to be engineers in the first couple of years at the school, and maybe this is one of the ways that my university did it. Basically, you are reduced to learning it on your own from the book, and this is not the first course that this happened to me in my first couple of years, and if you are not smart enough to be able to get at least a B in the class learning it that way, well then, your future career in science doesn’t look good. Later on, I came to find out who the good professors were, and tried to register for their classes as soon as I could, but the registration system was arranged by letter groups assigned according to the first initial of your last name and by the time they got to me, the good sections were always filled. Many of us felt this was not fair and raised an outcry and sometime during my sophomore year they decided to try be fair by starting at “Z” first. But my last name is in the middle of the fucking alphabet!!! I don’t think I *ever* got a class with the person that I wanted until my junior year, when every class was being taught by a full prof, but by then the damage was already done.

Ok, so here’s the funny part: Someone I was to meet later when I joined Theta Chi fraternity was in the same class with me. One night a couple years later we are talking and he finds out that I took calculus with Zhang and he’s like, “Oh, you too hunh? I couldn’t fucking understand a word!! Pawabowa!” and I am like, “Pawabowa?? What is pawabowa?” and he’s like, “Exactly! It took me 2/3 of the semester to figure out that he was trying to say, *parabola*!!”.

Hmm. So, if it took him that long to figure out one of the more common words that the professor was using, how much do you think he learned?

Pawabowa.

posted by Darkwand @ 3:18 PM