Tuesdays are for Toads

The exam went well last night. No real surprises. I could have scored an A, but I'll have to wait and see. The hardest part was selecting the questions to answer. Disturbingly, I dreamed of international law this morning, only to be rudely awoken from a blissful slumber by my alarm. Damn it felt warm under those covers too.

I read in the paper this morning about the latest row involving erstwhile Prince Harry. The royal family is essentially a family of dense material as they're all stiff as a board and thick upstairs. As is tradition, the men go to this military school for college and have military careers after. Most of the careers are for show, a couple years of service, followed by a lifetime of pomp, circumstance, and charity shows. To follow this yellow brick road, Princes still have to qualify like every other student. That means they have to get at least one A Level. An A Level, as best as I can understand and describe, is basically like 95 percentile in a field of study at the high school level, nation wide. We don't really have it in the US, although maybe that's what the Standards of Learning (aka, SOL, or Sh*t Out of Luck if you don't pass) is or is becoming.

Anyway, as I mentioned, the royal family is dense, so Harry's A Level was in Art. I mean, it's not like he had any private tutors or all the advantages of extreme wealth or anything, so he did the best he could with what he had. Or did he? The row is that his former teacher, after being sacked, claims that she wrote his final paper for him and the head of the art department painted the majority of the picture, not the Prince. It's a big deal to accuse a member of the royal family of cheating and it's huge to accuse the Prince of it, but it sounds all too credible to me. What really galls me, though, is how the British public just turns a blind eye to the fact that "their Prince" is only able to qualify through Art. Then again, when the enemy comes a calling, you just might need someone to paint a scary picture to frighten them away. F*cking royals.

Last night at the pub for the post-exam drink, one of my classmates who was essentializing women's roles last week, brought up that debate again. When she continued to essentialize women, I was finally able to make my argument that it's not only false to suggest that women are more peaceful, but also viewing women of power in that way contributes to the iconography of sexist, "know your place woman" type ideals. She didn't entirely agree with me, but that was ok. I got to make my point. Of course, throughout the evening when the conversation turned from interesting to boring (a bitch session about one of our professors) I concluded that she is rather thick indeed.

I found myself in an odd place last night. Several of my classmates have complained about the difficulty in getting good grades and figuring out what certain professors want. I certainly understand the problem; I was peeved when my prof gave me a B+ on a paper last October when I knew that I had done a better job than several others who had graded higher. In fact, I'm still pissed about that because, as Big Worm said, "there's principalities in this!" But that's not the point. The point is, I was offended because my ego was on the line. It wasn't simply a matter of how well written the paper was, it was a matter of how I did vis-a-vis my colleagues. After swallowing my pride and talking to the prof about the paper, I learned very quickly where I had gone astray and I have been acing his papers ever since.

The point of this long winded narrative was that when asked by previously mentioned thick clodhead about how I always get A's, I was in an impossible position. I learned from my prof because I listened. Most of the complainers in the program don't listen, thus they never learn. She is definitely one of them. But even beyond that, her ego is definitely on the line. She is having problems because she used to score better as an undergrad at U of Colorado, Boulder. So, I told her that. I said that you need to check your ego at the door, swallow your pride, and talk to the prof on a one-to-one basis and figure out what you need to do to be successful.

Of course, in the distant background buzz that is my internal monologue, I knew that it was advice likely to be immediately disregarded. But, at the time, yet another thought occurred to me. One of the weaknesses of this program is that the school is tiny - there are only two "full-time" profs and they both have jobs elsewhere meaning they aren't on campus that much and they just aren't available much if they're needed. The prof in question is not what I would classify as a good teacher, but he is a good guy and you can learn from him if you give him a chance. But his inaccessibility has undercut his relationship with half of the students in the program who expect that for the money they're investing, they'll have full-time faculty that will work with the students. I'm not so bothered by all of this, but I guess I just expected less than they did.

To sum up, I think there are many reasons talented individuals achieve different levels of success, but maturity has to be a central concern. I would suggest that at least 90% of the students in the IR program should be able to get A's and A-'s. Some may have to work harder than others to achieve that, but it should be possible. Unfortunately for them, that doesn't happen because people allow emotion, stress, and fear to divert their focus. I suppose that's life in a nutshell.

Finally, I discovered why Real World called me at 7:45 yesterday morning. Only Real World could think this way or imagine a world in which this behavior even rhymes with "totally f*cking unacceptable". I'm still in shock myself. She called, at 7:45 in the morning, to make sure I was up so that I would not miss the exam. Really, when it comes down to it, what everyone needs is a wakeup call 12 HOURS in advance. Yes, that's right, the exam was at 7 PM last night. As Ross Perot would have said, "See, in life you have some crazy people. And then, see, you have a second group see, and they're the truly crazy - psychoctics, schitzos, the whole gamut of what we'd call crazy. See, as you can see from my pie chart over here see, there's another section that most people don't know about see. And that's Real World. She has her own level of crazy see." It boggles the mind how anyone's brain could operate like her's does.