Angst

Maybe it's the late hour, maybe it's the fact that I have an exam in 4 hours and I'm lost, but right now I'm really agitated at engineering textbooks. Err.. or this engineering textbook. And this engineering class as a whole.

I'd like to think that it's that mathy person in me and not that I'm slow but I HATE HATE HATE the fact that the engineering textbook, homework solutions, and lecture slides throw up equations and explanations without units, without specifics, just "approximations" to an explanation. As if, "well really this should specify which composition I'm talking about and bla bla bla, but this is engineering so I'll just pretend like it doesn't matter and talk in generalities." ARGH! If you tried to write a math proof like that... someone would kill you. I would kill you.

Random equations and loosey-goosey explanations do NOT teach anything. It's one thing when you're trying to give someone an intuitive feel for the concepts, but it's completely something else if you're discussing a rather technical topic and introducing it for the first time and instead of being very careful with your wording you just vomit a bunch of vague statements that might be referring to any number of things.

And what the hell is up with these homework solutions that only make any sense if you actually solved the problem correctly in the first place. There's no explanation, just a formula and some number and a big DUH. If my solution was 100% right in the first place I wouldn't be using the homework solutions to learn from my mistakes. But if the damn homework solution doesn't provide any explanation then it's USELESS. If I handed in something that even resembled the posted homework solutions, I'd get 0 credit.

BLAH.

I'm mad.

I hate this class.

I'm graduating!

Today, I satisfied the very last of the requirements necessary for graduation. Nope it had nothing to do with world culture, or labs, or art, or philosophy. Today I finally took the swim test. Now even if I fail every single class this term, I will still graduate (with a single major instead of a double, but hey it feels good to say that anyway).