Whoa! (Part 1)

Long time no see. A couple of REALLY cool things happened recently. Amy filled you in on the car, I think.

I had my final on June 15th for my precalculus class. That was a very difficult class for me, and I didn't do particularly well on the tests. Failed a couple, actually. However, I did extremely well in the homework and a project we did, and so I wasn't really doing too badly--a low B, which is not bad if you're me and you're taking precalculus.

My instructor's policy is that if you do poorly on the final, it won't hurt your grade. It basically gets thrown out. If you do well, however, it will help you. Not a bad deal, all things considered. So I studied hard for it.

On the day of the final, I went in and breezed through most of the questions. (It was multiple choice, but that doesn't really make a precalculus final a whole lot easier.) There were a few I had to work a little harder on. The last one I sat messing with for about half an hour (no exaggeration). It was a very simple triangle problem, and it SHOULD have been really easy. But try as I might, I couldn't get any of the answers provided.

By this time, I was the only one left, and asked my instructor, "Do you want this answer exactly?"

"Yeah," he said.

"Well, it isn't here," I told him.

"Sure it is," he replied.

"Not possible," I said.

Finally he agreed to look over my work, and asked me why I had used a certain method to solve the problem. Then he indicated what the correct answer was according to the key. So, that was it.

I went home in a terrible funk. Amy was all ready to celebrate, and I just wanted to stay in bed all day the next day. Before we went to bed, I decided to check my email, and lo and behold, there was an email from my instructor with the simple subject line, "You were right":

"I am sorry, but I missed another error on your copy of the exam. The answer should have been 8 square root 3. You had the highest score of the class getting 27 out of 30 right. You also get 5 bonus points for catching the error allowing every one else to have the question dropped. ...

Sorry to have caused so much stress on your last day. Nice job overall and good luck on your educational journey."

This is for a guy (me) who always said he didn't understand math and didn't like math. I'm almost ready to cry again, because I cried when I read that. Partly I felt vindicated, but mostly it was from a a feeling of gratitude for what Jesus has done for me to take me this far. I ended up getting a 3.5 (roughly an A-) for the course.

This post is getting really long, so I'll get to the other thing in a little while.