Well, for the past three days I've been intermittently working on a project. Project #16, to be exact. Except for a few tweaks and some questions, I was pretty happy with how it was going. I had a battery of questions ready for help and one of my classmates pipes in and wants to know why I keep talking about question #16. I look at the top of the page and there it is, plain as ink on paper. #6.
Back to School. If you want to feel old and vulnerable, try going back to school at any age older than 30. My first class back was College Algebra at our local community college. I'd withdrawn from and failed the class twice as a teenager. Now I was taking the steps to the second floor of the same school again, except the steps were a little harder to climb and the only person in the class that was older than me was the instructor and she'd retired from teaching and returned out of boredom.
I'd found an Annotated Instructor's Edition online for something like $40. That meant the answers to every question were in the margin in red. It ended up being a lifesaver as I worked through the problems. I could work them until I came up with the correct answer. She only gave us accumulative points on the homework, so it wasn't like I was cheating.
That first class was a nightmare. I was in new territory so I pretty much kept to myself. Being young had changed and--at the same time--it had stayed the same. The Geeks, the Jocks, the Loners and the old lady in the corner that never said anything. I eventually spoke to a petite girl to my right that always sat in a upright fetal position. She admitted she was not going to pass the class. It was over for her. I wondered if that was how I looked over 25 years ago when I realized that College Algebra would prove to be the better opponent. Probably not. At the time, I didn't care.
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