Minus the actual swampy-ness, because there wasn’t all that much sogginess or giant anacondas. Which was sad, because really, who wouldn’t want to go to school and see a two-foot thick, scaly, green, man-crushing serpent? Preferably performing that man-crushing on people you don’t like.
No, it was rather uneventful, other than that I could not get to sleep on Tuesday night, due to an unexplainable sore throat which kept me getting up to drink water every few minutes. My throat was just dry beyond belief. It was torturous. So anyway, eventually, I downed three glassfuls of water, one after the other, and was somehow able to get to sleep.
Still, I woke up slightly late and spent the entire day wishing that the people around me were dead, in some way or another. My classmates commented that I looked like I had a hangover. I replied that I was actually suffering from withdrawal symptoms. Withdrawal from being around smart people. I neglected to mention that last one.
I spent the rest of the time ranting about how people just have amazingly horrible grammar. Okay, not that my writing is entirely correct either, but at least I don’t butcher the language to the point where it just gets difficult controlling my gag-reflex. Thankfully, I have learned to convert the gag-reflex into a more useful annoyed snapping at the offender. Ugh.
There’s a certain person who happens to also seem to have PMS all the time, who I suspect, is guilty of butchering the English language in such a manner. Guilty, of turning today’s quiz into a torture device more potent than the Iron Maiden, for anyone who happens to be able to converse with the language of a primary schooler. Sheesh. I know, “xenotransplantation” has many syllables! That doesn’t mean it’s a difficult word. Come on. It’s not difficult to understand. It’s not difficult to figure out how to turn it into a noun. And once you’ve done that, it’s not that difficult to figure out whether or not its supposed to be plural or not.
Also, when referring to MANY things, it’s probably plural. I wouldn’t know. It’s so hard.
So anyway, ironically, not long after imagining the brutal murder of this certain person for being an idiot, I myself began to feel dumber than ever. No, it’s got nothing to do with the idiots around me. They’re not contaminating my mind. It’s just that I feel that I don’t know… Anything.
Yes, that’s not true. But this is how I’m thinking about it right now. During my secondary school years, I was able to rattle off entire(though simple) essays about metabolic pathways and blood transfer. It made me feel intelligent, that I had gained a substantial amount of knowledge. But now… Now, I don’t know anything. Or rather, I haven’t learned anything. There is no textbook. There is nothing to memorise, that has any link to anything else in this botched up thing they call a syllabus. There is not enough relevant homework, there isn’t a TYS, or any assessment compilations. I have gained substantially more knowledge from watching Iron Man than I have from this entire semester.
Okay, minus the pathogen identification stuff. Those are the only things that I can call part of my knowledge now. But it just doesn’t feel right. Everything we’ve learned so far in microbiology is really dispersed. One method here, one method there. No links. And they have not yet put any emphasis on memorising the names of the substances used. I’m guessing that they will eventually tell everyone that they need to know the difference between carbol fuschin and bromothymol blue.
(Ooh, there’s this really trippy piece in the Mario soundtrack)
On top of that, the lab manual doesn’t really explain how the processes work. I suppose that is not supposed to be found in the lab manual, but rather the theory sections. Now here’s the interesting thing. There isn’t a theory section.
Not a problem though. After all, the internet is a great place to find information that you don’t have.
Looking at it that way, there isn’t a problem. But when you take into account the sheer wrongness of the information they’re feeding us… Well, the difference in content is just, a lot. For one, the school seems to be using a twenty-year-old source. They claim that prokaryotes have no cytoskeletons. A quick wiki tells us that prokaryotes definitely have a kind of cytoskeleton. They also mention that archaea also have evidence of a cytoskeleton.
So. I should probably bring this up to the authorities, or I swear, I’m going to somehow make the phrase “Polytechnics: Made for idiots, by idiots” stick somewhere…
-Joe