Chemistry

Ah, yes, I just looked at the outdoor thermometer and it says 60 degrees. Sixty warm, wonderful, glorious, sunny degrees. The snow is melting fast enough that we've heard our sump pump kick in several times. The weather is a wonderful gift this week.

I'm relaxing with a cup of lemon herbal tea after spending a little over an hour listening to online class lectures. That first online class in the fall just made me want to stretch my brain a little more. Right now I'm listening to lectures from two different classes. I'm enjoying the Intro to Philosophy class – it's taught through the University of Edinburgh, and the professors have these wonderful lilting accents. Well, except for this week. Ten minutes into an 11-minute lecture yesterday, I realized I wasn't hearing an accent. I'm not sure why it took me so long to come to that realization......I really was paying attention. Hopefully the next couple of weeks will take me back to the British Isles.

My other class has been somewhat of a disappointment. This was a class that would have worked better in a classroom. I got lost the first week and have been meandering since....and from the scores I'm getting on my quizzes, I'm definitely not meandering in the proper direction. I think I know where we're headed with the mechanics of dissecting arguments to determine whether or not they are valid, but we need to actually get somewhere! Six weeks into the course, I'm still not sure where I am.

I was a pretty decent student in high school. I had my favorite subjects (history, english, and business, as well as music), and I had my dreaded subjects (any form of science). And yet, as I raised my kids and lived life, I surprised myself by remembering so much of what was discussed in my freshman year biology class. As the kids worked through their science studies, I quoted Mr. Newman's favorite “remembering phrase" to them to remember the biological divisions: “Kindly please consider our fine geological specimens”........translated in order to stand for “Kingdom, phyllum, class, order, family, genus, species”

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Senior year was a year I merely endured. I had so wished I could graduate a year early, but that wasn't destined to happen. I wanted so bad to get to college and start the next phase of my life. And academically, that year was a bit of a disappointment. We did have a wonderful English class with Mrs. Graham. I still remember reading MacBeth and other English Literature.

I also remember a dreaded half year of chemistry. Mr. Sugg was a wonderful superintendent. However. I remember clearly his calling me and one other senior to his office the first day of school and telling us that we needed to be sure to take chemistry or we wouldn't get into college. Neither of us was very excited about that. And I will honestly say that I was lost from the first day of class. It was a miserable semester. Normally in our small school, classes lasted for an entire school year. There was no semester change of classes. But both my classmate and I did some independent research and found out that neither prospective college required chemistry in high school.

In what may have been an unprecedented event, my classmate and I presented a united front to Mr. Sugg. Even though I don't think he wanted to let us drop chemistry mid-year, we had our facts straight and presented a strong case. Neither of us was in danger of not graduating if we dropped the class, we both had plenty of credits and all the state requirements. So he allowed us to drop chemistry.

I often wondered if part of his decision was based on the fact that in the fall he had to tell the two of us that we would not be offered our anticipated senior level history class – Current Events. We had both pored over the Time and Newsweek magazines in the school library all through high school, anticipating this class being offered our senior year. But they simply had run out of teacher hours – up until that year, they had combined both English and history classes to include two years of students in each class. But that year all the core classes were divided into individual grade levels, and no one was available to teach Current Events. Mr. Sugg knew how disappointed we were – to me, it was worth it to be able to get out of chemistry!