Bobcat High, Day 2

We went over the homework in math today and I got to be a total Front Row Frannie, since I figured out several problems that no one else (was willing to admit that they) did. We had a quiz and it was good. When I got up I saw the person behind me had a totally blank paper; not a good start to the semester, girlie. This is furthering the math mastery streak I've been on ever since I happened to see Robert searching for the solution to an integral he was using in his dissertation work and realized almost immediately, Holy shit, I know how to work this problem with a u substitution! (That was a definite rule the school high point for me, since up until now, all of the math assistance between me and Robert has come the other way.)

I got my student ID made, on which I thankfully do not look drunk or stoned, but am rather more stern-looking than I expected. Watch out, man, this person is seriously, almost dementedly, fixated on her education.

I spent my long break in the library for the most part. I found an interesting looking book on consumer psychology that I am going to keep going back and reading every Tues/Thurs until I am finished with it. I figure there is no point in checking it out and carrying it around while the library is willing to store it for me. In the outrageously unlikely event that someone else checks it out, I will simply move on to another book. They have a lot of them, after all.

By far, the funniest moment of my day was when looking up books in the catalog, I became confused by one titled: Disciples of the wise: the religious and social opinions of American rabbits. I clicked on it to see more information, and of course, the title really said "rabbis."

My grad-level psych class (seminar on attitude change in the context of health psychology) is going to be odd, but hopefully good. Dr C (and I do mean "Dr C" because she has a very difficult to pronounce Polish name, which when I asked her after class how to say it, she said, "I will tell you but it probably won't help" and apparently people just call her Dr C) had worried that the class wasn't going to make, but we have 6 students - a health psychology major, two health something else majors, a criminal justice major, one woman I have already forgotten about, and me. The overall approach is probably more applied than I would prefer (because most of the students are in applied subjects, this makes sense) and some of the assignments are a little outside of my area of interest. We have weekly short papers due on the readings, two essay tests, a research presentation (an academic lecture on recent research in an area of interest), "co-facilitation of class discussion" for one of the class meetings that we will get to choose, and a very strange final. We are to design and delivery a 30 minute health education lecture on the topic of our choice geared to a specific audience (e.g. I could make up one on the importance of physical exercise for the audience of low-income families with children) and write a paper explaining the theory behind the design and justifying the choices made. Today she discussed the Elaboration Likelihood Model, which I am not only familiar with but just had a lecture on this topic at CSU a couple months ago, so I was all over it.

After class, my classmate T, who is a health psych major, and I went to the library to run some photocopies and since he already obviously knew Dr C, I asked him if he had been an undergrad at Texas State. He said, No, I went to A&M; I'm still trying to adjust to how small this school is. And I said, My school was really small, so this seems big to me. He asked me where I went, and I told him. (I have been avoiding playing the Rice card among my classmates at CSU but in this context, it would have been weirder not to say and the guy seemed generally cool and unlikely to assume I was trying to be a ass.) He said (and it was interesting and pleasant for that his mind went to this immediately), You guys have a good marching band, I hear. I said, Yeah, an amusing one, anyway, with a lot of enthusiasm if modest talent.

I recognize that it seems crazy that TSU, with 26,000 students, would be kind of "small" but given that A&M has 45,000, that is small in comparison. And it does dwarf the 5,000 students at Rice.

[A google search revealed that 14 of the top 120 colleges by enrollment are in Texas.

UT-Austin 50,000; A&M 45,000; University of Houston 35,000; University of North Texas 31,000; Texas Tech 28,000; UT-San Antonio 26,000; TSU 26,000; UT-Arlington 25,000; San Jacinto College 24,000.

Houston Community College 40,000; North Harris Montgomery Community College 36,000; Austin Community College 36,000; Tarrant County College 34,000; El Paso Community College 26,000.]

Walking back to my car at 2:30 was brutal. It was not terribly hot - maybe 92 degrees - but it was humid and I was carrying a 20 pound backpack (which I weighed when I got home). Twice in about 20 minutes I found that my right hand had fallen asleep, presumably from the pressure of the backpack. I am not taking my calculus book with me to class again. Once again, I had reason to love the super-awesome air conditioner in my car that I did not have to turn above setting 1 to cool down very quickly.