Fall Semester is Finally Over

It's been a while since I posted, and I really have a great excuse: post-scholastic trauma disorder. I had no idea that finishing off a semester would be so exhausting. Although I only had two exams during finals week, the last exam was the toughest.

The Ethics exam brought our class together in a way that the group projects never did. We were meeting on a regular basis, comparing notes, looking at the mid-term exam answers, arguing about exactly what Aristotle said, in contrast to what Plato and Kant said, and generally working ourselves into a collective intellectual froth. Fortunately, Father Pratt let us bring a 4-by-6 card into the classroom for the test. I filled mine up with outlines for the essay questions, reminders for the definitions, and lots more in a font labelled "teeny-tiny." The only thing I had not figured on was writer's cramp, something that doesn't usually happen at the computer. I lost about five minutes of exam time trying to convince my right hand that it didn't want to cramp up before I finished writing the essays. I drove home that night with my left hand, and spent the days before Christmas recovering from the mental and physical stress.

Amazingly, I got an A in the class. Plus, the professor liked the term paper, but wants me to do some more work on it, for further use.

Since then, I've been to Seattle for two different Christmas celebrations, and I've hung around the house, catching up on bills, baking Christmas cookies, watching movies, and doing the cleaning that was suspended in the final weeks of fall semester. Fortunately, most people don't drop in when you live this far out of town, so the mess has been missed.

Spring semester is loitering on the horizon, of course. Books have already been assigned by two of the professors, so I've purchased them and tried to start on Mary, Queen of Scots, but my enthusiasm has been a little low. Perhaps older students need a deadline to get the reading done.