Final Final

I took my last final exam of the semester today. I am officially out of school for the summer.

I was thinking that I would probably get a B in the class. I've had A's on all my work, but I know for a fact that I missed 5 days of classes. Yeah, I know, I know--it was unavoidable, I assure you. The first time, I did not call the teacher and let him know before class began, but for each subsequent absence, I phoned his office before class and left a message, stating that I would be absent. I figured that covered 2 excused absences, leaving me with three, which would deduct points from my total.

Before we began, the teacher made some announcements, handed back errant papers that had never been collected, then he had a few people stand while he announced that they had only been absent twice all semester. We gave them a round of applause.

Then he called one girl's name to have her stand, and he announced she had missed 1 1/2 days (she had left early one day.) Again with the applause.

Then he called my name! Me, and a few people after me. He announced that, according to his records, we had only missed 1 day. HHHHUUUUHHH????? The guy that I sat next to all semester looked at me like "Yeah, right!" I leaned over and said it must have been because I always called. Shortly after the folks with perfect attendance got their round of applause, the teacher confirmed my guess, stating that he knows life sometimes gets in the way and that when people made the effort to let him know in advance, he didn't count it against them.

So I may get an A after all. Still, I could be on the bubble because of the final. It consisted of two parts--a take home analytical essay that he gave us last week, and an in-class objective exam that we took today. I know I nailed my essay. I'm good at that stuff. You may not be able to tell it from my rambling here, but I actually write well. Everything that I wrote for this class all semester got A's with glowing commentary, so I feel very confident with that half of the final.

However, the objective exam was a different matter. It spanned 3 texts and all of our in-class notes. He allowed us to have all of our materials with us, but even then I could not find answers to some of the questions he asked. There were 30 questions, and there were 5 about which I had NO idea. I put answers in for four of them (3 were multiple choice, the other two were fill-in-the-blank.) I wrote an answer on one fill-in-the-blank question, but the final one asked the translation for a certain phrase, and for the life of me I could not remember ever hearing that phrase. I knew which text it was being drawn from, and after completing the rest of the exam (which was quite easy), I spent an extra 25 minutes thumbing through the text, hoping to God that the answer would pop out.

It didn't. I spent 10 more minutes checking the other texts, though I knew that was futile. So I had to leave it blank. That always saddens me. If I could have even come up with a reasonable guess, I would have felt better, but I was at a total loss.

So now I'm done. It's just a matter of waiting till the grade posts to know what my status is. Next step is to start saving money for next semester, though technically I need to find a job and EARN money before I can save money....