The Next Dark Age
We're in it Now
Meanwhile, Back at the Library
I missed the Holiday Sale altogether. I missed the set up. The wonderful pulling of every last box out of donations from the closet and being the first person to see them. I missed sorting them out and making a pile of what I will take right that second.
I missed the whole thing.
So when I arrived last night, I had no idea what to expect. But it was all cleaned up. The bookshelves looked the same – maybe a bit neater. There were three or four boxes of new donations in the closet. We have a new laptop computer (the last one fried) that I hadn’t used before because I had been bringing my own while I was in school. It is actually the next generation of the one I have now so I had a little moment of envy. Maybe it is two generations ahead, even. Whatever.
We have sold 18 books online in the last week, which is fabulous. I am happy when we average seven. I didn’t see any notes on the total sales for the week, but I will hear them at the holiday party.
It had been so long since I’d been there I didn’t know what to do first. Sort new donations? Read the volunteer notes? Go shopping? I did a bit of everything, which is a good thing because between the holiday library closures and my travel schedule I won’t even be back until the last week in January. (sigh)
But check this out:
Last Class
The story begins a couple of semesters ago, on the “Water Cooler” discussion board of whatever class I was taking at the time. It was your basic “here’s what to expect in your next class” discussion. Marketing is the most reading. E-Commerce is just crazy. (Note: It was not. E-Commerce was taught less from a textbook and more from online experience. As well it should. And that made some people crazy. I thought it was the best course in the program.) Corporate Finance was murder. Specifically, the final exam was murder.
The way I remember it, the posting student said that in his class the raw average on the final exam was 40%. That was not a typo. 40%. And only the magical curve saved everyone. I remember dismissing the statistic, thinking that even if such a problem existed at one point, it must have been corrected by now. Corporate Finance had been revamped since then, so the final exam must have been addressed.
So I wander in to Corporate Finance, my final course in the program. I am a B+/A- student and I have learned my way around the program. I go through my coursework and am holding a 91% average going in to the final.
The final exam is 40% of our final grade. Now get this:
3-hours to Complete
10 Questions
Multiple Choice
Open Book/Open Note – including financial calculator
The only thing we are not allowed to do is access other Internet sites. Or MS Excel.
Are you suspicious yet?
It was the worst exam I have ever taken in my life. Twelve years of public education. SATs and ACTs. Two professional certification programs. Four years as an undergrad; two years in graduate school. Worst. Exam. Ever.
At the end, when I was searching for a Eureka! moment, I realized that even if I had that moment, I would not have time to rework all of the problems to apply it. I actually gave up.
To make a long story short (too late). I got a D on that final. The curve brought my final grade to a B, so I passed the course and get to graduate.
I am told that Corporate Finance is no longer a required class in my program.
The Civil War and Reconstruction Era – 1845-1877, Lectures by David W. Blight
I just finished watching the final lecture in Professor Blight’s course on Academic Earth. I’ve been talking about it rather haphazardly because I have been watching them rather haphazardly this semester, so to pull it all together:
Academic Earth is a website that offers “full video courses and lectures from the world’s leading scholars” free of charge to anyone with a decent Internet connection. When I first got onboard, back in June, I noted there were five courses that I wanted to take. By “take” I actually meant following along with the reading, if not actually working the written assignments. I meant to follow the syllabus in something close to real semester time. Of course, I didn’t have the time to do that while in school “for real” and I didn’t really feel like waiting until I had the time to do all of the reading. So I just played the lectures and watched them like you would watch TV. Which is good because they have added material like crazy in the last six months and I don’t even know what to start next.
When Professor Blight is speaking, he reminds me of Indiana Jones in the classroom. If Dr. Jones were older, nerdier and a straight-up academic historian. (OK, so not, but Harrison Ford could totally play this guy.) He tells great stories and points to plenty of sources – assigned and otherwise – in his lectures. He regularly referenced books that are in my house. A few that I have even read already. In fact in the last one, he quoted from Confederates in the Attic, by Tony Horowitz. My mother read that last year and thought it was great. He once had me running to the other room in the middle of the night to see if I had the same edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass because it had an appendix with a really great speech in it. I was very disappointed to find it wasn’t the same. He assigned The March, by E.L. Doctorow, the book that arguably started me on this Civil War kick in the first place. When he said that he used to assign The Killer Angels as the fiction piece for the course…well, I am a hundred pages into that one right now.
Note to Mom: Besides being a big Bruce Catton fan, Dude’s from Michigan. He compared a little-known Catton essay that had stabbed him in the heart with seeing his childhood hero – some Detroit Tiger that played right field – smoking a cigarette in the airport. I thought that would amuse you.
So. The classes are the big lecture hall type things where the guy is talking and there are no questions or other student interactions. Apparently, in the actual course, there are two lectures per week and section discussions on some regular basis. This is fine with me, because the students would likely have ticked me off. The technical stuff is fine in that there aren’t a whole lot of issues with microphones or problems with the camera or anything. My only complaint, and Academic Earth warns you ahead of time, is that we can’t see the material on the classroom overhead projector. Copyright issues. I can live with it.
I love this guy. I loved his course. I love the very concept of Academic Earth. I’m going to go read that book now.
Charitable Donations
MSN had an article that involves News to No One – that charitable donations are down again this year.
It confirmed something that I had suspected – that the Salvation Army had the bell ringers out early to try to snag a few weeks more out of its seasonal campaign. That several civic organizations are closing their doors altogether. That more people are in need of services from organizations that are already strapped.
The article noted that the American Red Cross is trying an online gift catalog to raise funds. You can see a button down the right-hand side of the screen that the parrot rescue is doing the same through the One Cause group and I am trying to support it. My online holiday shopping has netted something like $8.00 in donations, but every little bit counts.
I got a rather disconcerting e-mail this morning from Best Friends Animal Society. They started a fundraising effort based on the promise of matching contributions from some big-deal donors – dollar for dollar up to $1,000,000. Fabulous, right? So I went online and made my average annual donation last week. The e-mail today said that they had raised something under $300,000. Except they said it like this:
“Our heartfelt thanks to all of you who participated in this million dollar matching gift challenge. In spite of the short notice, an uncertain economy, and the added holiday stress, you managed to join together to raise $297,506.
And now we have more great news! Those generous donors who made the matching offer have decided to extend the challenge by another week!
We know you’ve already made a special gift to help reach this goal. It would be fantastic if you could make another. And one other way to help is to spread the word… please tell all of your friends about this big challenge.
You’ve proven, once again, that Best Friends members stand above all others in their generosity, their determination, and their heart. (We already knew that.) But with these extraordinary results, we hope you know it now, too.”
Of course, my two local groups – the parrot rescue and the library – need every dollar we can scrounge together. I haven’t even been to the library to see how the Holiday Sale went, but the Amazon sales seem to have picked up a bit. And I am planning to organize a toy making event for the parrot rescue. We all have random toy parts sitting around that we can donate and put together for the birds, if only we would take the time.
So I hope you are all doing what you can do. Spare change for the red kettles. An extra $5 for the group closest to your heart. ‘Tis the Season. Or something.
Final Exam
I took my final exam on Friday. I have a great story to tell, but it isn’t quite funny yet. I’ll keep you posted.
Sticker Shock
I purchased and wrapped gifts for my father, my stepmother and their dog. I placed them in the box from my last toysrus.com order and filled it in with the eco-friendly shipping peanuts from my last order with Drs Foster and Smith. I taped up the box. I could have taken it to work, sent it UPS and repaid my employer. But it seemed easier to take it to the post office on Saturday and be done.
The nice lady behind the counter handed me a fresh shipping label and asked if I wanted to insure the box. Knowing that UPS automatically insures up to $100, I asked if USPS does the same. No. What would it cost to insure? Upwards of $30. Then no. What about signature delivery? No.
So basically, I sent a 9 pound box regular ground USPS. There is no insurance, no guaranteed delivery date and no signature guarantee. And what did this cost?
$22.50.
I will not be making that mistake again.
The First Snowfall
Yes, everyone forgot how to drive. And that guy that does the donuts in the abandoned parking lot behind my office? Got started early. Except it looks more like driving in circles than in performing the donut maneuver:
Where Spooky Sleeps
This is where my mother found the cat while I was out of town:
Representing O’Hare
I was in The Big Boss’ Office in Washington this morning. He looked at something online and told me to get gonig to the airport right that second or I might not make it home. I had put myself on the standby list when I checked in, and was thankful for the go-ahead to bail out. When the snow starts early, it can snarl air traffic all day, and I’d been hearing 3-7 inches.
Arrived at Reagan at 11:20. Security was really light, but by the time I arrived at the gate, the 11:30 have departed, and the 12:30 was cancelled so there wasn’t much chance I would make the list for the 1:30. I was booked on the 2:30. I did some mental calculations:
If the 1:30 is delayed by half an hour and it isn’t noon yet, I can figure I will be delayed two hours on the 2:30 flight. Math..time zone change..math…I will still be home around dinner time. So I settled in with a book and a snack. Then I walked around a bit. And read some more. The 1:30 flight boards. My plane has already arrived. United guy gets on the loud speaker. He tells us that while the system shows a 3:15 departure, we should all hang around because they are trying to do better than that.
Apparently, if you are already sitting on the tarmac with a full flight, you might be able to guilt or blackmail air traffic control into letting you take off. And once you are in the air, what are they going to do?
Not two minutes later, the same guy is at the gate, telling us to get our butts in gear because this puppy is going to move. (He didn’t actually say that.)
But remember yesterday when I was rolling my eyes at the Global Alliance people? Well, this is the situation where you want to be travelling with them. Because we got to boarding and everyone was helping everyone else with the bags and the coats and the getting settled. Would you believe some of them were also on my flight to Washington yesterday? (You know you are travelling too much when you start to recognize other passengers.)
Bottom line: my plane landed exactly six minutes later than scheduled. And the snow is still coming down.
I love O’Hare. I love United Airlines. I am going to go online and tell them so.
Oh, Coward!
The second show of the season at Writers’ Theatre this season is a musical revue of Noel Coward material called “Oh, Coward!”.
The Next Dark Age 