Saturday, May 31, 2008

Starting Over

Don't worry, the rest of my tales of my trip to London are on their way as are some photos. I just got the photos put onto disc last weekend, and going through them is going to take some time... I took over 900 photos.
Plus I have a bit of a dilema in that I essentially am without a photoshop program at the moment. On my laptop I had installed photoshop last year, and since the hard drive was just about full, I moved it over to my external hard drive (whom I lovingly call "Max" since its a "Maxtor") and deleted it off the laptop. It still worked just fine when I ran it from Max.
Since it worked when I ran it off of Max with my laptop, I figured it would work the same if I just plugged it in to my Grandmas iMac desktop set up.
WRONG.
Whenever I try to run it now, it tells me that it can't find my user name or serial number. I figure that I'm going to have to install it on the iMac, but first I'll have to find what I did with the original photoshop discs and hope that the serial numbers with them. Yes - I am incredibly disorganized.
So, I've been making do with the limited tools available on iPhoto. Basically, all that I can do is crop, turn to B&W, and tweak brightness and contrast a little bit. Thats it.

In other news, I took today off from work. I would love to say that I took the day off to kick back and relax, maybe do something fun with friends, but no. I went back to school. I went and met with a counselor to get a feel of where I should start. Let me just say that meeting with a counselor was the most pointless thing I did all day today. Essentially what I did was wait for about an hour to have her tell me that I should take the same classes that I thought I should start out with when I was looking at the requirements for the nursing program online this past week. PLUS, the craziest thing is that I told her I work full-time, yet she still suggested that I start out by taking three classes in the summer semester where everything is accelerated AND I haven't been to school in nearly a decade.
So far, I'm only enrolled in one class - General Principles of Psychology - but am considering adding another. I would ideally like to get into a Nutrition class since its a requirement for the program as well, but all of the classes at American River are full. I think that I may have to see if its available at Sac City College. If I can't get into the Nutrition class at either location this semester, I may have to put it off until the fall and see about taking English (Composition) this summer.
Where I'm going to have some potential problems is with math, it was never my strong suit to begin with and today the counselor confirmed that when I took the assessment tests 10 years ago I tested into Intermediate Algebra but she advised that I take the online assessment and print off the results if I enroll in a class so I can show the instructor. I took the online assessment for ELEMENTARY Algebra and got 50%. I totally suck. I don't want to start over in Pre-Algebra and have to work my way back up to Intermediate, but also don't want to go into Intermediate at such a tremendous disadvantage - and I am going to need to improve my math skills for the Chemistry classes that I'll be having to take. Any suggestions?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Math is a use it or lose subject-- I'm not certain I would do well on an assessment either. The thing with math is that if you get in over your head, it's not just a matter of content mastery to catch up. It's a conceptual hierarchy that requires time to build on. I think it's better to take the easier class and solidify those fundamental concepts than to be in over your head in a class that's more advanced. That being said, why not enroll in both, visit the bookstore and flip through both texts and see how far you get? If the elementary stuff is familiar, you might be fine in intermediate.

Shauna said...

The other day, I had to multiply without a calculator. I was at church and I had to figure out how much we had to turn in for sweatshirts for girls camp. Riveting, I know. Anyway, I had to multiply something really simple like 15x16. AND I had scratch paper. I totally did it wrong and we paid like $30 more than we should have. My 10 year old niece is now smarter than me.

That said, I think you should just go off of your old math assessment. I'm way rusty at math, but once you get into a class and you've got a book and a calculator, it'll come back. It's like riding a bike. A really stupid, pointless bike. You'll be fine.