Cheater, cheater
During my final in business class, we had an exam made up of multiple choice questions on a Scantron and short answer questions asking for the definition of a phrase or concept. The final was not hard. The teacher was in front of the class, proctoring. Then, he left the classroom. For at least twenty minutes. What transpired during those twenty minutes: chaos. People consulted their notes and books (the exam was closed book, closed notes); call and responses on multiple choice answers; and one guy even walked up to the front of the classroom, and glanced at the exams that were already completed. It was a sad moment in academia. After those twenty minutes, I turned in my exam and left.
Lesson:
1. Don’t cheat; that’s just scummy. I wonder, however, if cheating was the supplemental to the intro to business course, and if I demonstrated my lack of qualifications even to be successful in business. Ouch. Honest business, an oxymoron?
2. Don’t listen to anyone who is helping you cheat. Why would you trust anyone who is helping you cheat?
Thus ends my serial ranting about my intro to business class. I miss it! My classes this quarter, Logic and Business Law, are not as amusing, mostly because the teachers are actually in control of their classes. There are some gems that I have scribbled in the margins of my notebooks, so I will dig those out and extrapolate.
Showing posts with label Lessons. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lessons. Show all posts
31 March 2009
23 February 2009
My last few weeks, Part I
-Prelude
-Health Confessions
-An Explanation of my last post
-Following up on the group projects
-Oh and we hate that guy in my group
Prelude:
This is the first post that I have submitted wherein I will type a rough draft in a word processing program so that my final posted entry will make sense. Lots of things have happened since the last post so I will try to highlight the more interesting things. The winter term has ended at the school and I started classes for the spring term this week. This term I am taking two classes: Logic and Business Law. I look forward to some great stories, although I’ve only started the Logic class. I was late to class the first day (mortal sin) because I could not find parking! I looped an outdoor parking lot one time, and an indoor five-story parking lot three times before I found a space. And I only found that space because I saw someone trying to back out, and I let them. I expect this to be a long entry, so I may break it up into multiple posts and/or shorten each section and pimp it with pictures and links for the fullest multi-sensory blog sensation ever[Note, I have decided to break my super long semi-ambitious entry into multiple entries but I don't have time to pimp it up/out!].
Health Confession:
I have not taken my multivitamins since I don’t know when. It turns out that multivitamins may not have additional health benefits, according to a NY Times article about a study on the benefits (or non-benefits) of multivitamins. So ha.
An Explanation of my last post:
I wrote that post in the middle of the night just before the early morning of the day our final group project was due. I was sleepy. My group, except that crazy guy, is pretty awesome. Sorry for the deafening post.
Following up on the group projects:
The last week of classes we had three class meetings. On the first day we all presented our Group Project A. On the second day we took a final. On the last day we all presented Group Project B. Our Group Project A was about Obesity as a problem in the US that President Obama and his administration ought to address. Please insert appropriate Tom Daschle or Kathleen Sebelius joke. Anyways, we were the only group to focus on a topic that was not business or economy related. Most groups presented on the national deficit, the state budget crisis, or the auto industry. Our group went over the time limit, and I think the teacher was getting really bored. I will say that in the middle of ours, when the crazy guy presented about Exercise & Obesity, we had the class stand up and perform so exercise to encourage the fight against Obesity, the 9-headed Hydra of our times. We also had a mini-quiz complete with pictures of delicious food for our portion on Childhood Obesity.
For Project B, we had to create a business plan for our made-up business. That was really fun, but I think we overdid the project. That was the project that made me lose it and make an angry post. Apologies again. We decided to open an organic café, named O-go, in a local community (a “census-designated place” aka not a city). The idea took a while to grow on me, but once we were able to pull data and do research, I had lots of fun. I learned much about the demographics of that community and organic foods. It’s not really the best climate to open a café serving only organic foods now, but it was hard to argue since everyone thought opening a café would be really simple and fun. I did, however, try to convince the group that establishing our legal form as a SEVEN person partnership would be a bad idea (partnerships do not protect the partners from unlimited liability of the business or the bad things that the other partners may do) and that the better idea would be to incorporate (the business becomes a corporation, which is a separate entity, almost like a human [corporation from corpus, Latin for body]). But the corporation idea was eventually turned down because we “all” decided that we would work for free for the first year for our café, and that calculating wages or 1099s for the corporation would be too complicated. It is make-believe, but I can’t even suspend my disbelief for that.
Our presentation time for the second project was much shorter, which is awesome. All the groups had great ideas, and one other group, whose business was a Mexican restaurant named Macho Taco, brought food to class. We really could not compete with that. To be fair, the other groups’ ideas: Fast & Fresh (fresh and healthy fast food); Dog care-taking (grooming, walking, poop-scooping); Book-busters (renting textbooks to students); Frozen yogurt (with a bunny as a mascot); and a pharmacy. All ideas had some online presence, and many dealt with food. Suprisingly, many groups chose to be a partnership. Maybe corporations just have too negative a connotation for people?
Oh and we hate that guy in my group:
That guy, we’ll call him Al, because that is a shortened version of his name. Hell hath now fury like a woman scorned. That guy, Al, managed to piss off 6 women by not working on the projects, not showing up when we presented our second project, and begging/asking/compelling us to stay after class to join him in solidarity as he begged the teacher not to fail him but to give him a second chance after missing almost all classes, missing the group presentation, and missing the FINAL. I wish I kid.
It’s not like we set out to hate the guy, but he was so irresponsible and such a liar that we really had no choice but to hate him. Let me try to recall the premises to support the conclusion that we are justified in hating him.
1. He rarely (using “rarely” to mean to the point closest to “never” without being “never”) showed up to class, and when he did, I think he came in late and left at the break, which was probably for a duration of half an hour to 45 minutes. And while he was in class, he just sat there and played and texted with his phone. Now, that would be a fine of his time, but what really irked us was that we had no idea if he’d ever show for our group projects.
2. When we met outside of class for our projects, we clearly planned a time and place that we can all meet. First meeting was in the public library; the guy didn’t show. He came up to us in class the next day and said that he was there and that we weren’t there. And we said, no we were waiting outside for half an hour before going inside (some other people were also running late), and he said, Oh, I was sitting in my white Mustang in the parking lot, didn’t you see me. NO, YOU IDIOT, we didn’t think to look in the parking lot when we specifically said, Let’s meet in front of the library. I guess we forgot that the parking lot located to the side of the building was part of the front of the library.
3. We also met in the café area of a major chain bookstore. The guy shows up, late, brings his girlfriend, who is clearly too good for him, offers us energy drink samples which he won at a push up contest at a fitness convention, leaves for a while during the meeting, comes back and write his part of the memo on Obesity, including such gems as “Men are more likely to be obese due to eating too much fast food. The reason they eat so much fast food is because they don’t know how to cook and may not have a girlfriend or a wife to cook for them” (which was thankfully, not included in our fake memo to the President), and then leaves early before we work on the second project.
4. We met at least three other times. No show, late and left early, late because he overslept and then upon arrival randomly started to expound on great perfumes for women. What?
5. He has great excuses as to why he does what he does: He’s late and busy because he and his father are opening a school for automotive field inspectors, the people who inspect your car after an accident and give an estimate of the damage. He has to leave early because he’s going hiking with his girlfriend; at the same time, he has to leave early because his friend’s car broke down and he has AAA and has to bail out his friend. He’s late but he’s thinking of a good excuse to give us when he arrives.
6. All of these sound normal, but aren’t we all normal people with things happening in our lives that require special attention?
7. His girlfriend has accompanied him to class (she’s not a student of the class) and has taken notes for him. According to Al, she’s really smart, is going to the best school, and can speak seven languages. Maybe she’s not fluent in reality because clearly she’s too good for you and yet doesn't seem to realize it.
8. These incidents happened before our last week, in which his behavior was appalling.
9. Our first presentation went well. Then after the break, Al returns to class with a girl who is not his girlfriend and who is not in the class, and begins to talk to her while other groups are presenting; he’s sitting in the front row. During other groups’ presentations, he starts counting something with his fingers; I wondered what he’s counting; I figured it out: he’s counting the number of times a certain girl is saying “like” while presenting. You jerk! And about the girl who came to class with him, my group mates said that she was really dirty, like with soil, and had dirty fingernails, and was smelly; and had thus concluded that she was a hooker. I don’t really understand the logic, but ok.
10. He missed the final exam! Apparently, he ran into the classroom, told the teacher something, and then ran out. I was not there to witness this. I’ll have more to say about the final.
11. He did not show up for our last meeting for the second presentation. We were trying to get things done for the project, and he didn’t show up.
12. The day of the second project, also the last day of class, he didn’t show up by the time class started, and we wrote him off as not coming. We signed up to present third, to get it over early and “enjoy” the other group presentations. Our presentation went well. During class we hear these random shouts in the hall way. When the dog care-taking business group presented, they improvised awkwardly the shouts into their presentation as dog sounds. Anyways, just before the break, half way through class, the door opens, and Al walks in with his sketchy friend/cousin. He sits next to some of our group members and begins asking them if/why we presented without him, while other groups are presenting. He said to one of the girls, why didn’t you guys go last? And she answered, we didn’t think you were coming, we tried calling you but you didn't answer; to which he answered, well i dropped my phone, couldn’t you have at least gone last in case I showed up?
13. Then during class, while others were presenting, he asks us to stay afterwards to stand with him as he talks to the teacher and asks for a second chance at the final. He said it would mean more if the whole group stands with/behind him in this matter, and tells the teacher that he worked really hard and deserves another chance. The group didn’t want to be there, and half the group was scared of what he would do if we didn’t stay. You really couldn’t say with sketchy guys like that. And he looks thuggish, tall, always wearing sunglasses, even at night or indoors, has physical strength, probably has ethnic gang connections. So we decided that the teacher knew what was up with that guy, and that we didn’t want trouble, so we stayed but didn’t say anything in support of or against him, although we did imply that the teacher ought to decide what is fair as the final judge.
a. Oh, weirdness: I think I was hit on by some guy in the class at this point. Or at any rate, I received a compliment on my section of the presentation, and I am reading too much into it as a being-hit-on-moment by a guy in class. Sorry you older guy with a small business, who hates labor laws and workers’ rights, and sports golden locks longer than Rapunzel, I’m not interested.
14. After the “meeting” with the teacher, in which Al completely sucks up to the teacher, saying I love your class, I tried really hard, I worked hard, I learned so much, etc, three of us left the class together to walk to the parking lot, it was me, one of the other girls, and the mom in the group. As we walk towards the bridge, we hear feet pounding behind us, it’s Al, his sketchy looking cousin/friend, and one other guy from class (we’ll call him The Youth). He asks us, hey did you hear the shouting in the hallway during class? We say, Yeah. He says, That was me, ha ha ha! It was so funny. We were in the hall way, shouting, and this guy here says oh look they’re doing presentations, and then we kept running and shouting, and then I remembered that that was my class and our presentations were tonight! And then the mom started shouting at him like he was her kid, you know in that mom way, but he thought she was kidding, and was laughing. It doesn’t help that she sounds like she’s joking when she’s mad. Anyways, the other girl is really shaken, she looks scared, so I asked her and the mom if they want something to drink, we’re about the pass a coffeeshop, and they say yes, so we go inside. Fortunately, the guys just started smoking, and in their chivalry, even offered us some cigarettes, and since they didn’t put out their cigarettes, they couldn’t go inside, so we, thankfully, escaped from them at the door of a coffee shop chain. We waited a few minutes, ordered some drinks, and left. The mom and I were mad but not scared, but the other girl was mad and scared; scared that the guy might do something to her, or follow her to her car or something crazy. So the mom and I walked her to my car, then the mom walked me to my car, and then we all drove off safely without another sight of Al and lies. I think the mom and the other girl and I are going out to dinner, so yay, I made friends at school! Situations like that makes me wish I were back at the alma mater, with those stairsteps specifically engineered to help women escape faster. I am also proud to say that I was carrying my Whistle that evening. I also miss alma mater because we didn’t have idiots like that running around, and if they did, they’d get beat up. The end.
Lessons to learn:
1. Don’t lie.
2. Don’t lie to women.
3. Don’t lie to six women.
4. Keep your appointments; if you’re late, you call; don’t lie when you call; if you can’t show, you call; don’t lie when you next see the people you stood up.
5. Don’t sit in your car in the parking lot when you’re supposed to meet at the front entrance.
6. Pull your weight. Or at least “delegate” so it looks like you’re doing work.
7. Don’t follow women-who-hate-you to their cars. They will hate you even more, if that’s a possible quantity.
8. Dude, how are you still alive?
-Health Confessions
-An Explanation of my last post
-Following up on the group projects
-Oh and we hate that guy in my group
Prelude:
This is the first post that I have submitted wherein I will type a rough draft in a word processing program so that my final posted entry will make sense. Lots of things have happened since the last post so I will try to highlight the more interesting things. The winter term has ended at the school and I started classes for the spring term this week. This term I am taking two classes: Logic and Business Law. I look forward to some great stories, although I’ve only started the Logic class. I was late to class the first day (mortal sin) because I could not find parking! I looped an outdoor parking lot one time, and an indoor five-story parking lot three times before I found a space. And I only found that space because I saw someone trying to back out, and I let them. I expect this to be a long entry, so I may break it up into multiple posts and/or shorten each section and pimp it with pictures and links for the fullest multi-sensory blog sensation ever[Note, I have decided to break my super long semi-ambitious entry into multiple entries but I don't have time to pimp it up/out!].
Health Confession:
I have not taken my multivitamins since I don’t know when. It turns out that multivitamins may not have additional health benefits, according to a NY Times article about a study on the benefits (or non-benefits) of multivitamins. So ha.
An Explanation of my last post:
I wrote that post in the middle of the night just before the early morning of the day our final group project was due. I was sleepy. My group, except that crazy guy, is pretty awesome. Sorry for the deafening post.
Following up on the group projects:
The last week of classes we had three class meetings. On the first day we all presented our Group Project A. On the second day we took a final. On the last day we all presented Group Project B. Our Group Project A was about Obesity as a problem in the US that President Obama and his administration ought to address. Please insert appropriate Tom Daschle or Kathleen Sebelius joke. Anyways, we were the only group to focus on a topic that was not business or economy related. Most groups presented on the national deficit, the state budget crisis, or the auto industry. Our group went over the time limit, and I think the teacher was getting really bored. I will say that in the middle of ours, when the crazy guy presented about Exercise & Obesity, we had the class stand up and perform so exercise to encourage the fight against Obesity, the 9-headed Hydra of our times. We also had a mini-quiz complete with pictures of delicious food for our portion on Childhood Obesity.
For Project B, we had to create a business plan for our made-up business. That was really fun, but I think we overdid the project. That was the project that made me lose it and make an angry post. Apologies again. We decided to open an organic café, named O-go, in a local community (a “census-designated place” aka not a city). The idea took a while to grow on me, but once we were able to pull data and do research, I had lots of fun. I learned much about the demographics of that community and organic foods. It’s not really the best climate to open a café serving only organic foods now, but it was hard to argue since everyone thought opening a café would be really simple and fun. I did, however, try to convince the group that establishing our legal form as a SEVEN person partnership would be a bad idea (partnerships do not protect the partners from unlimited liability of the business or the bad things that the other partners may do) and that the better idea would be to incorporate (the business becomes a corporation, which is a separate entity, almost like a human [corporation from corpus, Latin for body]). But the corporation idea was eventually turned down because we “all” decided that we would work for free for the first year for our café, and that calculating wages or 1099s for the corporation would be too complicated. It is make-believe, but I can’t even suspend my disbelief for that.
Our presentation time for the second project was much shorter, which is awesome. All the groups had great ideas, and one other group, whose business was a Mexican restaurant named Macho Taco, brought food to class. We really could not compete with that. To be fair, the other groups’ ideas: Fast & Fresh (fresh and healthy fast food); Dog care-taking (grooming, walking, poop-scooping); Book-busters (renting textbooks to students); Frozen yogurt (with a bunny as a mascot); and a pharmacy. All ideas had some online presence, and many dealt with food. Suprisingly, many groups chose to be a partnership. Maybe corporations just have too negative a connotation for people?
Oh and we hate that guy in my group:
That guy, we’ll call him Al, because that is a shortened version of his name. Hell hath now fury like a woman scorned. That guy, Al, managed to piss off 6 women by not working on the projects, not showing up when we presented our second project, and begging/asking/compelling us to stay after class to join him in solidarity as he begged the teacher not to fail him but to give him a second chance after missing almost all classes, missing the group presentation, and missing the FINAL. I wish I kid.
It’s not like we set out to hate the guy, but he was so irresponsible and such a liar that we really had no choice but to hate him. Let me try to recall the premises to support the conclusion that we are justified in hating him.
1. He rarely (using “rarely” to mean to the point closest to “never” without being “never”) showed up to class, and when he did, I think he came in late and left at the break, which was probably for a duration of half an hour to 45 minutes. And while he was in class, he just sat there and played and texted with his phone. Now, that would be a fine of his time, but what really irked us was that we had no idea if he’d ever show for our group projects.
2. When we met outside of class for our projects, we clearly planned a time and place that we can all meet. First meeting was in the public library; the guy didn’t show. He came up to us in class the next day and said that he was there and that we weren’t there. And we said, no we were waiting outside for half an hour before going inside (some other people were also running late), and he said, Oh, I was sitting in my white Mustang in the parking lot, didn’t you see me. NO, YOU IDIOT, we didn’t think to look in the parking lot when we specifically said, Let’s meet in front of the library. I guess we forgot that the parking lot located to the side of the building was part of the front of the library.
3. We also met in the café area of a major chain bookstore. The guy shows up, late, brings his girlfriend, who is clearly too good for him, offers us energy drink samples which he won at a push up contest at a fitness convention, leaves for a while during the meeting, comes back and write his part of the memo on Obesity, including such gems as “Men are more likely to be obese due to eating too much fast food. The reason they eat so much fast food is because they don’t know how to cook and may not have a girlfriend or a wife to cook for them” (which was thankfully, not included in our fake memo to the President), and then leaves early before we work on the second project.
4. We met at least three other times. No show, late and left early, late because he overslept and then upon arrival randomly started to expound on great perfumes for women. What?
5. He has great excuses as to why he does what he does: He’s late and busy because he and his father are opening a school for automotive field inspectors, the people who inspect your car after an accident and give an estimate of the damage. He has to leave early because he’s going hiking with his girlfriend; at the same time, he has to leave early because his friend’s car broke down and he has AAA and has to bail out his friend. He’s late but he’s thinking of a good excuse to give us when he arrives.
6. All of these sound normal, but aren’t we all normal people with things happening in our lives that require special attention?
7. His girlfriend has accompanied him to class (she’s not a student of the class) and has taken notes for him. According to Al, she’s really smart, is going to the best school, and can speak seven languages. Maybe she’s not fluent in reality because clearly she’s too good for you and yet doesn't seem to realize it.
8. These incidents happened before our last week, in which his behavior was appalling.
9. Our first presentation went well. Then after the break, Al returns to class with a girl who is not his girlfriend and who is not in the class, and begins to talk to her while other groups are presenting; he’s sitting in the front row. During other groups’ presentations, he starts counting something with his fingers; I wondered what he’s counting; I figured it out: he’s counting the number of times a certain girl is saying “like” while presenting. You jerk! And about the girl who came to class with him, my group mates said that she was really dirty, like with soil, and had dirty fingernails, and was smelly; and had thus concluded that she was a hooker. I don’t really understand the logic, but ok.
10. He missed the final exam! Apparently, he ran into the classroom, told the teacher something, and then ran out. I was not there to witness this. I’ll have more to say about the final.
11. He did not show up for our last meeting for the second presentation. We were trying to get things done for the project, and he didn’t show up.
12. The day of the second project, also the last day of class, he didn’t show up by the time class started, and we wrote him off as not coming. We signed up to present third, to get it over early and “enjoy” the other group presentations. Our presentation went well. During class we hear these random shouts in the hall way. When the dog care-taking business group presented, they improvised awkwardly the shouts into their presentation as dog sounds. Anyways, just before the break, half way through class, the door opens, and Al walks in with his sketchy friend/cousin. He sits next to some of our group members and begins asking them if/why we presented without him, while other groups are presenting. He said to one of the girls, why didn’t you guys go last? And she answered, we didn’t think you were coming, we tried calling you but you didn't answer; to which he answered, well i dropped my phone, couldn’t you have at least gone last in case I showed up?
13. Then during class, while others were presenting, he asks us to stay afterwards to stand with him as he talks to the teacher and asks for a second chance at the final. He said it would mean more if the whole group stands with/behind him in this matter, and tells the teacher that he worked really hard and deserves another chance. The group didn’t want to be there, and half the group was scared of what he would do if we didn’t stay. You really couldn’t say with sketchy guys like that. And he looks thuggish, tall, always wearing sunglasses, even at night or indoors, has physical strength, probably has ethnic gang connections. So we decided that the teacher knew what was up with that guy, and that we didn’t want trouble, so we stayed but didn’t say anything in support of or against him, although we did imply that the teacher ought to decide what is fair as the final judge.
a. Oh, weirdness: I think I was hit on by some guy in the class at this point. Or at any rate, I received a compliment on my section of the presentation, and I am reading too much into it as a being-hit-on-moment by a guy in class. Sorry you older guy with a small business, who hates labor laws and workers’ rights, and sports golden locks longer than Rapunzel, I’m not interested.
14. After the “meeting” with the teacher, in which Al completely sucks up to the teacher, saying I love your class, I tried really hard, I worked hard, I learned so much, etc, three of us left the class together to walk to the parking lot, it was me, one of the other girls, and the mom in the group. As we walk towards the bridge, we hear feet pounding behind us, it’s Al, his sketchy looking cousin/friend, and one other guy from class (we’ll call him The Youth). He asks us, hey did you hear the shouting in the hallway during class? We say, Yeah. He says, That was me, ha ha ha! It was so funny. We were in the hall way, shouting, and this guy here says oh look they’re doing presentations, and then we kept running and shouting, and then I remembered that that was my class and our presentations were tonight! And then the mom started shouting at him like he was her kid, you know in that mom way, but he thought she was kidding, and was laughing. It doesn’t help that she sounds like she’s joking when she’s mad. Anyways, the other girl is really shaken, she looks scared, so I asked her and the mom if they want something to drink, we’re about the pass a coffeeshop, and they say yes, so we go inside. Fortunately, the guys just started smoking, and in their chivalry, even offered us some cigarettes, and since they didn’t put out their cigarettes, they couldn’t go inside, so we, thankfully, escaped from them at the door of a coffee shop chain. We waited a few minutes, ordered some drinks, and left. The mom and I were mad but not scared, but the other girl was mad and scared; scared that the guy might do something to her, or follow her to her car or something crazy. So the mom and I walked her to my car, then the mom walked me to my car, and then we all drove off safely without another sight of Al and lies. I think the mom and the other girl and I are going out to dinner, so yay, I made friends at school! Situations like that makes me wish I were back at the alma mater, with those stairsteps specifically engineered to help women escape faster. I am also proud to say that I was carrying my Whistle that evening. I also miss alma mater because we didn’t have idiots like that running around, and if they did, they’d get beat up. The end.
Lessons to learn:
1. Don’t lie.
2. Don’t lie to women.
3. Don’t lie to six women.
4. Keep your appointments; if you’re late, you call; don’t lie when you call; if you can’t show, you call; don’t lie when you next see the people you stood up.
5. Don’t sit in your car in the parking lot when you’re supposed to meet at the front entrance.
6. Pull your weight. Or at least “delegate” so it looks like you’re doing work.
7. Don’t follow women-who-hate-you to their cars. They will hate you even more, if that’s a possible quantity.
8. Dude, how are you still alive?
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