2 1/2 down, 1 1/2 to go

It's hard for me to believe that I'm going home in a few days.  I feel like I just had my spring break.  But after this week, I'm going to need a nice long break.  I spent the last 24 hours completely cramming for biology, and I think it paid off.  I had a nice system going of reading the chapter while looking through the lecture powerpoints, and doing online quizzes to test myself.  After about 4 of the 6 chapters, that got old and I got kind of lazy.  I didn't read the entire chapter or really look through the lecture notes.  I figured the lecture was just a few days ago, so I would remember it.  When I took the test, it was very obvious which chapters I skipped.  I flew through the first 35 questions.  Then I pretty much guessed on about 10.  For some reason, I'm not upset with myself.  I think I feel like I really learned a lot and that makes me feel good about my grade.  I guess I'll find out.  I would be completely surprised if I got an A, and really upset if I got a C.  

Now I move on to Chemistry.  I have spent the last 2 1/2 hours reading the textbook and doing example problems in the text.  I've done surprisingly well and it's amazing how much better I understand the material after reading it.  It makes me wonder why I go to class at all because I just end up reading the book and understanding so much more.  But maybe I understand it so well because the information is already in the back of my head somewhere from the lecture.  Anyways, I was doing really well until about 4/5 of the way through the chapter.  This entire chapter is about predicting what kind of reaction will happen and how fast the reaction will happen based on a set of conditions.  Each section of the chapter adds another variable that will affect the reaction.  I was doing really well until about the 5th variable and now it's too much for my brain to hold and it's all spilling out.  So I think it's time for a break.  I have been summarizing each section and then at the end I'll write it all down and do a ton of example problems with my summary there.  Then my goal is to take the summary away and see if I can remember most of it.  The good news is, I have until Saturday morning to get all of that done.  So no rush.  Tomorrow morning my professor is holding a review session so I'm hoping to have most of my studying done by then and during the review I can see what I need to go back and work some more on.  I think it's a good plan.  I always do better with a plan anyways.

I have started my physics "take-home" final.  The first problem took me about an hour, and I'm not even sure I did it even partially correct.  I couldn't find anything in our textbook about it.  It seems I should have gone to class that day.  But it's alright, I think he is going to curve so much that I'll end up with at least a B almost regardless of how I do on this test.  You can see how motivated I am to do well.  ha.  I think it's time for some chocolate ice cream.