LAST EDITED ON Dec-08-15 AT 08:37 PM (EST)
 
>my crowning
>achievement being trying to make a dipping sauce for some grapes out
>of Mini Babybels with nothing but a cook's torch and a frankly
>enormous overestimation of my own competence.

I'm surprised that didn't work! Frankly enormous overestimation of one's own competence is practically a prerequisite for getting into the really serious culinary schools.

>I find that my writing speed with the
>common-or-garden biro was, to quote J.K. Rowling, outstripped by
>passing butterflies. Thus, my classwork had an element of
>précis to it

Heh! My handwriting is either unusefully slow or so bad everything I write looks like a prescription. This has, over the course of the last few years, led one professor to ask quietly as I was handing in an exam, "Did you have enough time? I tried to calibrate the length of the test to your writing speed," which I found weirdly gratifying; and, on the other hand, to the single most amusing grader's note I've ever received. That was on one of the exams for the 100-level European History 1750–Present course I had to take as part of the core HTY curriculum, which was one of those giant lecture-hall classes with 150 sleeping freshmen in it.

That class was broken up into smaller groups for the weekly recitation/discussion sections, and each of those sessions was run by a TA, not the professor in charge. The general rule was that whichever TA we had recitation with was the one who graded our exams. My section's TA had the most maddeningly precise penmanship - he wrote like a pen plotter labeling an architectural diagram. Meanwhile, I write like a doctor in a hurry, and toward the end of a long essay exam, as my endurance begins to flag, it degenerates into a sort of semi-cuneiform mess.

All of which is a long-winded way of explaining why, on the last page of my booklet for one of that course's exams, my TA wrote a note in the margin in his precise, all-block-capitals hand:

I DON'T KNOW WHAT ANYTHING ON THIS PAGE
SAYS, BUT THE REST OF YOUR ANSWERS HAVE
BEEN REALLY GOOD SO I'M JUST GOING TO
ASSUME IT'S FINE.

>So at that Parents' Evening, the first thing he said to my mother was
>that he would not allow me to study GCSE History because my mother was
>obviously doing all my homework.

I've told this story before (in the "Fun in the Computer Lab" thread, I think), but this reminds me of the English teacher I had in high school who gave any paper that she could tell was written on a computer (and back then it was easy to tell) a zero without reading it. She believed that a "word processor" was some kind of AI program that would write a paper for you if you provided the topic and required length. My mother the educational computing specialist was not best pleased.

"HAL, give me eight double-spaced pages on Robert Frost, please."

"I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."

>And I'm now studying for a History degree, so joke's on him, the shit.
>=]

Heh, I'm reminded of the early episode of Top Gear where Hammond calls up his high school headmaster from the back of the Maybach he's testing. "'Never get anywhere in life,' I believe you said..."

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.