Finals are over and I have my grades for both Trig and Brit Lit. My Trig grade is right where I expected it to be - an A. Even though we rushed the last week, we left quite a bit out, which made the final easier.
Brit Lit, however, was a different story. After the final yesterday, I received my grade - a B. Looking back over my grades, I could not figure out how my grades came to a B. I averaged them several different ways and still couldn't come up with a B. I had a 92, 94, 100, and 83 for my test grades and an A, A, A, and a B for equally weighted essays. There were no other grades.
I asked the teacher how she graded but she gave me a vague answer, saying that's the way she has graded for ten years. She told me that a B was still a good grade for a college course. I replied that it may be good but it was not what I was aiming for., what I deserved, or what other schools want to see when considering my application. Too bad; it's not getting changed. It just does not seem like fair grading to me.
We had a pep rally this evening. It certainly wasn't worth waking me from my sleep for, but the warden and major tried to get us pumped up about the unit's upcoming review by ACA (American Correctional Association).
At first I had no idea what was going on. The whole dorm was wakened and everyone except four bunks were told to get dressed and get outside. At first I thought it was a shakedown because of someone else's boneheaded move. Then we were ushered into the dining hall where three quarters of the seats were filled by guys from other dorms. Now I was really confused.
The warden explained that we were privileged to be able to be at this unit that was being reviewed for ACA approval. I have no idea how ACA approval helps us, but the warden sure was excited. We have to make sure eveything is clean and organized to make a safe place for us to live and for the staff to work. Apparently we were supposed to get excited about cleaning just so the unit has some organization's stamp of approval. I could be wrong, but it looks like all the effort falls on the inmates to make the warden look good while we still don't get properly working sinks, TV's, AC, or the food or clothes that we're supposed to get. What is our reward? That's how you get people motivated.
Our dorm is already probaly the cleanest ion the unit, thanks to great dorm janitors. I probably woul dhave been better off doing what I was doing - sleeping.
Rabbit has moved into cell block now. I came back from Trig and some new guy was situating himself in Rabbit's bunk. Rabbit was kind of expecting to be moved because he had the same restrictions as Opie, just longer time. It was still disappointing to see him gone. He said he was going to talk to one of the lieutenants about getting moved back to shower crew and this dorm when he gets out of cell block, which would be great.
About ten minutes after I got back from school, Opie brought himself and all his stuff to one of the empty bunks. Apparently, they traded a body for a body and let Opie out early. The way they run this place is so contradictory that the only thing to expect is the unexpected.
My life has settled into a kind of slow monotony. Everything is scheduled and predictable. At the moment, the only things I am able to do to mix up the day is change what I read or talk about. I think it's actually changing a lot of my attitudes and behaviors for the worse.
For a long time I was very ambitious and wanted to do all kinds of things to either get out or prepare for life when I get out. I was writing many different people and organizations about help for quicker release and legal help. I made plans and backup plans for living and even came up with a couple of business ideas. I read all kinds of material.
So far, none of that effort has amounted to anything. It seems that it takes ten times the effort and motivation to get things done in here than in the world. A lot of that comes from the barriers put in place by prison and the people who run it, knowingly or not, and, because no one is here to encourage you or help out, it is easy to allow those barriers to get the best of me and cause me to slip into laziness.
I realized today that I have become pretty lazy compared to the way I was when I came to prison. Although I am still an overachiever compared to many of the guys around here, I have a hard time getting much of anything done. I feel like my efforts are wasted, like when I work hard and get no reward, treated the same as all the slackers.
I know this is not the thinking I need and I'm trying to get past it, but it seeems that right now it's just not worth the trouble. I will pull myself out of this, with God's help. I just don;t knwo when it will happen.
Final exams are coming next week and we are nowhere near where we need to be in Trigonometry. In order to get where we need to be, The teacher decided to cover one chapter each day of class - crazy pace for this kind of math.I see most of the trig problems as puzzles to be solved and I don't think it will be easy to fly through all the puzzles I need to be able to understand. I don't think we will be able to cover the important stuff that is packed into the last chapter.I hope that none of my future educational outlets read this because, if they do, they will probably be disappointed by the disparity between the classes I say that I took and the things I actually learned in class.
We have a new rule at this unit that we have to stay in our bunks after lights go out. Even though this dorm works at night, we can only be up to take showers or go to the bathroom. Previously, we could be out of our bunks to talk, eat, or read under the lights. On shower crew we often received permission to use the tables in the dayroom and watch TV at night because we always sleep during the day. No longer.
Last night we did not go to work because we didn't have chemicals to clean with. Most guys put off showering until after work, so we were able to talk the guards into letting us shower late. All the showers were full when I tried to get in, so I waited by talking with a guy on his bunk.
Out of nowhere I suddenly had a flashlight blinding me and a guard asking for my ID - always a precursor to a disciplinary case. I explained the situation to him. He ignored my pleas and took up two other ID's from other guys getting out of the shower.
Even though I knew the case was ridiculous, I was still a little scared that it would stand just because he wears grey and I wear white. Luckily, I had the lieutenant over the shower crew "holding court" for my case. I outlined what had occurred and he thought about it for a moment before completely dismissing the case. Thank goodness. I certainly didn't need a case over something stupid.
Well, my time with Opie in the dorm has come to an end, at least temporarily. His move to cell block (segregation) today was pretty unexpected. He had a disciplinary case about a week ago for having a dry erase marker (we used it to draw maps for role playing games) and he received a fifteen days commissary and recreation restriction. Under the old warden, all rec restrictions were housed in cell block, but I haven't seen any get moved back there since the new warden arrived in January. Supposedly, the rule changed to only cell or property restrictions being moved. With only rec and commissary, Opie shouldn't have been moved.
The strange thing is that we have two other people in the dorm who have restrictions who weren't moved. One of them even has cell restriction. The way things are run here makes little sense at all. Sometimes I think they try different ways of doing things just to assert power, even if it makes things confusing for them and especially if it makes things harder on us.
Now Opie will be in cell block for two weeks before he gets moved again. Maybe he'll be back in here, but probably not.
Our scores from the trigonometry test were finally given to us today. I very unexpectedly got a 110. How in the world did that happen when I didn't even finish the test?
It turns out that the teacher made all the graphing questions into bonus questions. I had finished everything except one of the graphing problems. All the other graphs were correct so that gave me a nice bonus.
The classes this semester are so different from those I've taken over the past five years. It's as if the teachers don't expect much from us because of our situation and continually lower their standards to make them fit us. How does that prepare us for a life outside? Many of the guys are here because they lowered their standards. It seems to me that, by lowering the educational standards to their (the inmates') level, the educators are merely encouraging the guys to stay the same. I know it's not true, but wouldn't it help more to maintain their (the teachers') original standards and require us to reach them?
Opie has had a vulgar mouth the whole time I've known him. I've told him several times that he should probably clean it up before he goes back out to his son. Lately he has expressed a desire to tone down his language, so we came up with an idea: push-up per word.
Now every time Opie uses profanity around me, I make sure he does one push-up. Sometimes he goes off on a string of cuss words, which means a string of push-ups comes with it. I think it is helping a little bit, but really it's too early to tell.
My side of the deal is that if he catches me using any profanity, I have to do one hundred push-ups. I figure it gives him extra incentive to pay attention to words said and also punished me for being hypocritical. So far he has done at least fifty; me - none.
Today was the first Trig class since our test. Our Tuesday class was canceled because the teacher was sick. I've been wondering how I did on the test since I didn't actually finish. I thought today would be the day to find out. I was wrong.
The teacher did not grade the tests at all. Over the weekend she heard that a guard found a cheat sheet in one of the desks in her classroom. She doesn't know who cheated and she was too angry to grade fairly, so she just let it be.
She was in a much better mood today. We barely got asked about the cheating because she said she was already pretty sure who had cheated and the suspect is not in our class. Instead we moved on to our new material. I'm still wondering how those tests turned out.
WHAM!
"Laundry workers, wake up!"
WHAM!
"Eight thirty. Education get ready!"
Both of these loud calls came before 6:20 this morning. The guard doing the yelling and slamming of the door to the dorm has one of the most obnoxious voices and has no respect at all for any of the inmates. Every time the door was slammed and the yell came, I woke up from my dead sleep. Even though she could see three quarters of the dorm sleeping, she would walk to the bunk area to shout. I wasn't the only one to wake up and I'm sure I wasn't the only unhappy one, either.
So far this dorm has been loud enough as it is. Between the raps, beats, and loud gambling, it's tough to get sleep. I've been getting rest in four hour spurts, often with rude awakenings dividing those. I don't know what kind of effect this strange sleep cycle will have on me, but so far, it doesn't feel good. I hope I will get used to this odd schedule. What would be best is for the dorm and guards to be a little quieter and not interrupt our slumber.
Over the past month I have been going out for work early. Before the shower crew can go into the dorms, someone has to prepare all the mop buckets. Lately that person has been me. I work in cell block, which only has two showers to clean because the guys housed back there have certain times they're allowed to shower. I always finish quickly so I;\'ve been filling the buckets to pull my share of the job.
Some nights I have to go clean a second dorm because we're shorthanded at the moment. Tonight was such a night. I went into the second dorm an scrubbed, rinsed, and wiped everything in about 45 minutes. AS I was coming out of the second dorm, the boss for the night told me to go clean the dorm across the hall. I told him that I had already cleaned two and had even come out early. He said it wouldn't hurt me to do another.
"There are sixteen workers on shower crew. Many of them are screwing around in the dorms instead of working. There's no reason I should have to pick up their slack as often as I do," I replied.
"Just get in there. You'll be OK."
I went ahead and cleaned the third dorm. I did it quickly and might have left a few spots behind. I just wanted to gett home early enough to get some good sleep before class tomorrow morning. Even after cleaning three dorms - more than I've ever done in the whole time I've been on this job - I was the first person finished and back to the dorm. How did that happen?!
Over the past two nights I've had some of the most fun conversations in a long while. Last night Ghost and I stayed up late tracking travel stories. He has family in Colombia and told me about festivals, parks, and crazy gangs that made stuff not so fun. In return, I told him some of my stories from London, Cameroon, and Ethiopia. It was fun just going back and forth for hours.
Tonight Rabbit kept me up asking about Cameroon and Ethiopia. While most people are content to hear the few highlight stories, Rabbit kept asking questions. What were the people like? How did they treat you? How did you get around town? What did you do for fun? What school like?
He was most interested in the market. Once I started describing the markets in both Cameroon and Ethiopia, we must have stayed there for three quarters of an hour. Pulling all those memories out - most of which I had not touched since I got back - took me back to Africa. At the end of our conversation I had to thank Rabbit for letting me relive those experiences. I now realize just how awesome that time was and miss it even more.
This is it -judgment day. Time to see if being in class actually helps when taking a test. I did get a practice test from a classmate yesterday, and spent two and a half hours going over it and referring to the book. Going into this morning's class I felt like I would do well, though I had to run back to the dorm to pick up my calculator. Oops.
I sat down, looked at the test in front of me, and saw that the problems before me were far more complex that what I had done last night. Most of the test was drawing translated sine, cosine, tangent, cotangent, secant and cosecant graphs. The problems last night had two digit changes to the equation, while today's had four and five.
I slowly - very slowly - worked through the graphs until the teacher said we should be halfway finished. I had barely worked the first page, so I skipped the rest of the graphs and tore through the quicker stuff. I came back to the graphs with about twenty minutes left. I had the last problem mostly complete when we were told to stop.
I did take everything slowly and checked my work, so except for that last graph, I think I did well. I'm just going to have to wait till Thursday to see what the actual judgment is. As the saying goes: the writing is the hardest part.
