Done for now…looking ahead

Last final of the term is complete and my brain can return to normal. For now.

That plant ID class should come with warning labels. It was nothing like I thought it would be and that really threw my winter term plans all askew. Don’t get me wrong…loved the class. But I was of the expectation that the course would be a little more…dunno…exploratory. I expected we would go through the Jepson and Lackschewitz keys, look at mounted specimens, look at photos of live specimens…stuff like that. Go over the identifiable bits. Yadda. What the class ended up being was brief glances of each of those things, but mostly just memorizing lists of plants and then vomiting the information back onto the page for each exam. I don’t feel like I’ve really gained much of anything, as I already knew how to ID via keys. We had so many plants and so many statistics for each plant to memorize, that I just cycled that shit right out of rote memory as soon as the exam was done so I could move onto the next batch. Wasted knowledge. Bummer.

To be fair, this was the first term they offered this course in such a manner. I’m going to suggest that they perhaps create a precursor course to it wherein you learn all the things about ID’ing, and just go over small handfuls of species during the term. THEN have the second class be nothing but ID’ing the plants. This way students fully grasp the concept of knowing how to figure out a species from scratch and can cull the information accordingly.

But at least now my brain can rest. 150+ grasses, sedges, reeds, forbs, shrubs, and trees, and all their various characteristics…memorized in less than ten weeks. And believe it or not, I have a 99% in the class. If you ever needed an answer as to why I am a mental case some days, you can bookmark this post and refer back to it from time to time.

What to do now?

Wow. I have a week and a half of free time going on. I need to drum up some activity. I think this would be the perfect time to engage in some heavy spring cleaning. With two male roommates who think nothing of being disgusting pigs, I need all the spare time I can get. Plus I desperately need to organize my wine. It’s everywhere and I may have to kick down a few cases to local friends just so I can make room. I haven’t updated my wine curator in about six months…this should be really interesting.

I have a feeling that I’m going to be playing a lot of WoW though. I’m sorely behind and could use the time to push ahead a little. The last two months have been so cruddy, I haven’t had time to even escape to WoW for a sanity check. I know, poor little gaming nerd. So sad.