I am all through with Philosophy/Logic/Rhetoric/The Software That Hates Me. We brought in our finals (and cookies) on Monday night and sat in a circle going through them. I got one fallacy wrong, but I argued that it was a reasonable choice given the language, so I got partial credit for it. That means I got an A on the final, and by golly that's an A for the course as far as I'm concerned. Hurrah!
Do not tell me you knew all along I was going to get an A. People keep saying that to me and I keep telling them it is never a foregone conclusion. This course was hard in unexpected ways, and I don't mean Venn diagrams. I've never had a class that didn't lead me by the hand before so I was constantly, unpleasantly surprised. The way it normally works is the education system spoonfeeds you. Course description, read the chapters in the book, get lectured on chapters with expansion and digressions, write papers or take tests, shampoo, rinse, repeat. And this class didn't do that. Half the stuff on our final had never been discussed in class and wasn't mentioned anywhere in the textbook! Tcha! We had to use our heads (and the Internet). Being an older student was a great help in this situation.
I always feel a bit unhinged the day after a final. All that effort and concentration for so long and then suddenly the pressure's gone. I wanted to come home and vegetate, but I was a good citizen and went to the Planning Commission's meeting tonight to listen to Item 6, revision of the local Honda dealership's hours of operation. Because, you know, you have to let the pressure ease off gradually or the whole thing goes thermonuclear. I thought a nice, tedious public meeting would be just the thing for decompressing. And it was.
My whole street has a beef with the dealership. The Honda people have an obnoxious, painfully intrusive P.A. system which they use (and abuse) beginning at 8am and going until 9pm, seven days a week. They have enormous, excrutiatingly bright lights on their lot which they do not dim after hours; it's physically painful to look across the street at night. And their employees are not allowed to park on the property, so all 50 of them park on our already overcrowded street. On Sundays it's no fun trying to negotiate the neighborhood, even walking, because of the traffic and double parking by the severely overpopulated church next door (zoned for 25 spaces, they have more than 200 members who turn up for services and musical performances). You can just imagine how well the idea of the dealership getting their zoning ordinance revised and the hours of operations extended went over. Man, people were mad.
But pleasant. They really were pretty darned even-handed. No one raised their voices. I thought virtually everyone argued effectively, but the General Manager of the dealership had almost nothing to say because the hearing was extended to January 15th. The notification of the neighbors was improperly handled and not everyone was notified. If you speak up at one hearing you can't speak at the next unless you have new information. So I didn't speak up, and neither did he. But I was really happy the Planning Commission made it crystal clear to the Honda manager that he has some compromising to do and some changes to make if he wants to sell cars legally at 7am on a Saturday morning.
If he doesn't make the changes I want to see then I plan to hone my critical thinking and rhetoric into a sharp weapon at the next meeting. I don't want that A to go to waste.
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