JB School

Well, my the final two classes of last week were a bit different. My Biology Lab focused on the 15 second discussion of the scientific method we had in class as part of the chapter one overview. We spent the three hour period going over safety (don't drink/eat in the lab, if you get anything in your eyes, wash em quick!), devising experiments to determine the contents of a "black box", and familiarizing ourselves with measuring equipment. I gotta admit I was a little disappointed; I don't really know what I was expecting for a first session, but I was hoping for things to be a bit more interesting. The fact that our next class will focus almost exclusively on how to use a microscope is not encouraging, but hopefully the sessions after that will prove interesting. My fellow students seemed a little impatient with the whole thing, and I guess I can't blame em.

The speech course on Saturday was also a bit outside the parameters I expected. The actual teacher was not present, so his "best friend" came by to monitor the class. Don't know why he was gone, don't know if his friend was an actual teacher, etc. etc. Functionally the class was: your syllabus is available online (I can't get to the section of PCC where it's located at the moment, I'll be addressing this later today in the lab at RC), I don't have a copy; this is your book, it's neat because the chapters are so short; find a partner and be ready to introduce them next time you come in. Not the most impressive presentation. I'm hoping that this just signifies that the instructor was caught flatfooted by something and had to pull last minute resources just to make sure that someone was actually there.

I had my first quiz in Algebra this morning; forgot my new(ish) TI at Eden's this morning, so there was a little scrambling there. Fortunately it was very much a "show your work" type of thing anyway, so that worked out, I think. I know I got the right answers, and I'm fairly confident that I illustrated how I got there sufficiently. The new subject for the day, finding interest, made immediate sense to me, so I'm in a pretty good mood about my direction in the subject. It's very odd, returning to it after really not having any significant math courses in a decade or so.

I checked in with financial aid advising yet again this morning, and while it looks like everything finally matches up between FAFSA, PCC, and US Bank, I'm going to have to talk to my parents tonight about a loan against my loan. The financial aid officer here at Cascade finally did me the courtesy of letting me know that it will probably take 4 to 6 weeks from this point to actually be disbursed, although she can't see any reason why it wouldn't be awarded. Since the due date for tuition is this Friday, that's a problem. She said that I wouldn't be disenrolled for non-payment for quite some time and that they have some leeway to waive the late fee for payment (once), I'd really rather just start out on the right foot. I did make sure that simply paying the tuition outright wouldn't prejudice my future status with FAFSA (it was filled out as non-dependent) and wouldn't affect getting the loan. Functionally what should happen is that I'll get tuition paid on time, then have the entire loan amount refunded to me since all fees/tuition have already been paid, which'll mean that I can then immediately pay the parents back. Fun, fun.

Other than the traffic, I'm kind of liking the morning portion of my schedule. It's kind of nice to have a built in break of sorts between the two classes at Cascade to just relax a bit, and maybe work ahead.