Light Fixtures for Days

This past weekend's Adult Work Party was a productive one!  The weather wasn't great, but luckily most of the work was inside.   The inside of the trading post was painted Thursday and Friday morning so we could start putting up light fixtures and installing switches and receptacles.  It took the better part of two days to put in all the fixtures, mostly due to the fact that we had to improvise a lot.  The lights we have are very nice; 6 bulbs facing down and 3 facing up.  They're hung with cables that come out of the top.  The only problem is that the cable mounts in the center of the top and the bulb sits in the center of the top.  See a problem there?  Luckily we have a metal fab expert (and his new apprentice) who spent most of the day making custom brackets to hang the fixtures.  They look so good that some people thought they came with the fixtures originally.  In addition to that, the end caps were all sized differently (which required some drilling and filing to correct).  Once we got them all installed, which took until 9 pm Saturday plus all of Sunday morning, we turned them on only to find that the quick-connect plugs were miswired at the factory and the top of some light up with the bottom of others.  So this week, I'll be taking them all apart and rewiring them.  Oh, and we didn't check bulb colors when we were putting them up, so we'll have to play musical bulbs until everything matches.  But since they were donated, it's worth a little extra work for the great cost savings.  Plus it was a good excuse for Ralph to show Chris some welding tricks.  It was a long haul, but we got everything installed after 9 hours of work Friday, 12.5 on Saturday, and 8 on Sunday.  I don't think I've ever slept that long after a work party!

Another ongoing project is the remodeling of MBC.  Greg Hammond spent yesterday crawling around under the deck, finding lots of "how-did-that-stay-up-for-so-long" construction flaws.  When the deck was added, it was nailed into the building without joist hangers and without a post supporting it.  Then, the outside wall was built on top of that.  So the deck was slowly sinking and in turn the wall and roof were on their way down.  But now, an extra beam and some pier blocks mean that we can finish up the framing and start work on plumbing and electrical.  

Alan and his crew are working on plans to remodel the basement of the museum.  With so much history and more and more pictures being added every month, we've finally run out of wall space upstairs.  This weekend, we got the downstairs completely empty so we can spruce up the floor and add some partial walls like we did upstairs a couple years ago.  I'm glad we have people who are so dedicated to constantly improving and adding to the museum so future scouts can see the history of camp.

From various posts on Facebook, it sounds like some areas got a dusting of snow last night.  It's nice and sunny here at camp, though, so I guess that means it's a perfect day for some trench-digging and grading around the building.  The air conditioning people are coming today to finish their part, then after some sanding of beams and minor light fixture modifications we'll be ready to start scrubbing the floor to get it ready to finish.  

Whatever...

As this quarter comes to a close, I find it harder and harder to care about school.  On a couple of exams recently, I've used the word "whatever" when deciding between 2 multiple choice options.  Just pick one and move on so I can get out of there.  It's like I've just stopped caring.  I don't think I'm alone in this thinking, either.  Many classmates that I've talked to feel the same way.  It's really too bad that it has come down to this mentality.  Because of the lack of consideration from professors, unfair and unrealistic expectations, disorganization, condescension, and sometimes utter nonsense that has come to pass the last couple terms, many people (myself included) have lost all motivation to do anything more than just pass classes.  We think "why study this when we know all the questions are going to trick us?" and are just burned-out in general when it comes to school because of the reasons above and what I've said in previous blogs.  It's true that for some sections on recent exams, no matter how hard you study or focus on what is correct and widely accepted, you'll still miss a lot of points because the questions are written to trick you or are based on one lecturer's personal opinion and not the norm (whether this is a conscious decision on the question writers' part(s) remains a mystery).  So what a lot of people think is "if I'm going to get it wrong anyway, why agonize over studying it?"  I do agree with this mentality and I plan not to study certain things for the final as hard in favor of studying the material that I know will be fairly tested on, hoping that that is enough to offset the lack of points in the "trick" sections.  It's really too bad that mediocrity has become the status quo, because what is suffering is our knowledge.

This is not how school should be.  We are paying tuition and attending grueling 3-hour classes so we can learn, not so we can be tricked and set up to fail.  Professors should be in the business of educating students and caring about them and their knowledge gain, not sending out ambiguously-worded rubber-stamp email responses to any questions that are asked or casting people aside like yesterday's garbage when they perform poorly on an unfair exam (along with 20 of their colleagues).

I hope that this is an isolated feeling we're all having right now and that after this quarter of hell (as well as parts of last quarter) things will shape up a little bit.  It's not going to do us much good to go into clerkships with a honey badger mentality that is residual from such a poorly-executed education.

I could go on for days (fer dayz) on this subject.  As I've said before, I'm not happy with my education but it's a means to an end.  After next year, I'll finally have a degree and I can be the pharmacist I pictured when I was accepted and have nothing to do with the school thereafter.  A classmate put it well: "My advice to the young: Don't do drugs. Be true to yourself. Don't go to pharmacy school. It's terrible."  It's funny, but sadly kind of true at this point.  I sincerely hope that the curriculum changes in the future so that other students aren't put through this wringer.  The combination of long, drawn-out classes, unfair exams, waste-of-time labs that cover unrealistic objectives, and many other factors contribute to the lack of caring that I, as well as some of my classmates, am experiencing and future students will continue to experience if they don't make some drastic changes.  From what some of the good professors have said, though, this change isn't going to come easily or any time soon.

Five more days and this quarter will be over!  Just gotta pass 4 more finals…