Finals 2010

  So here I am.  It is 8:48 PM on Saturday, and I am wearing comfy clothes in a clean house, blogging.  I haven't had the time lately, so I thought I would catch up on some things.  No homework, tests, or projects due on some future dates taint the sense of peace and enjoyment.  For once!  Yesterday was the last day of the first semester of my 8th grade year at HJHS.  Now I get my two-week Christmas break!

•   Finals

  Finals were wild.  They were so hard.  Ironically the one test I spent the most time FRANTICALLY studying for (Honors Science) was the easiest (other than my electives, Choir and Spanish), but maybe that's why it was so easy. Before we took that test, Mr. Cochran said that two kids in his first hour got the best score any of his students had ever gotten in five years of teaching, 84/86.  And I got that!
  On the H. Math final, I was desperate to get a good grade.  What I hate about that class is that I can get extremely good grades on all my homework and a bunch of tests and nothing happens, but just one or two bad tests can totally drop my entire grade.  Those two bad tests weren't ones that I was lazy on, not at all, but I made really stupid mistakes.  For example, putting down one part of a box-and-whisker plot instead of another (I misread it) lost me 4 POINTS!  The second bad test was only a few days before the final.  I was so certain I was going to have the first B in my life (Sorry if I sound obnoxious to you), but I was relieved to see I had a 91.8%.  I had to do well on the final.  On that day, hardly anyone in the class finished the final!  Somehow, people in other classes did, but we didn't.  I was so mad when he said to come in at 7:10 the next morning to finish, since my bus never leaves until 7:25.  Later I realized I was lucky, because he could have just made us turn them in as they were.  I was also able to look up the definition for one of the things on the test that was for two questions (Mom said it's not cheating!), which my teacher said we had learned but nobody had any memory of.  It wasn't even in our math book!   Finally, after a lot of more time finishing the test, I got a B.  In the second semester of 7th grade, I got a B on my math final by one point, and it had devastated me.  By now I have learned.  I was relieved this time, because my grade in that class became 91.3%.  I have kept my record of being a straight-A Honors student!
  My other hard final was Social Studies, which also was a B.  Some of the questions were so weird.  For example, "What did President Hoover say at the beginning of the Great Depression?"  It was like saying, "What is the color of the author of this final's eyes?"  We had only briefly gone over the GD right before the final (we learned it in 7th grade), and we certainly never learned anything about what Hoover said. Any of the options could have been the answer, so I had to guess.  The week before this final, we also had to do an essay exam on one of the topics he gave us.  I chose "complaints of the colonists prior to the Revolution" since I would be more at ease writing about history than economics or government.  I was lucky and got an A, but a lot of really good students got C's!  Mr. Fraher said that it wasn't him, but the rubric, and he wants to change the rubric. But that still doesn't change the fact that it hurt a lot of good students grades.  On the other hand, my friend Chelsea got a 100%!

  Anyway, I am so grateful for a strong body and mind that can allow me to do anything!  While the rest of my family has been getting sick with things such as pneumonia, I have managed to be healthy.  I have had lots of energy even when I went to bed at midnight a few times this past month (homework, studying, remembering projects like scrapbook pages at 10:30 that were due the next morning).  I have had really good grades.  Hard work pays off!  And like they say in YW, Knowledge is such a great thing, even when it requires stress and energy.
  But for now, I think I will have my break.