I Think I Can Do This, Part 2

A couple of weeks ago, I got online and shopped around for a backpack on www.ebags.com, where I'd found a great laptop bag for the Ibook I'd gotten my stepdaughter for Christmas. After looking at a number of them, I picked out a Jansport that cost about 40 bucks.

I've been very pleased with it. Someone must have been taking notes from college students. The straps are padded, as is the back; in backpacks I had in past collegiate forays, straps stucking into my shoulder and books jabbed me in the back. There's also lots of storage space for my ever-needed calculator, plus pens, pencils, little stapler, Post-Its, little pencil sharpener, my reading glasses, notebooks, telephone-book sized textbooks, white-out, scissors, and on top of all of that, I can throw my little Ibook in there, which I can use to tap into the school's free wi-fi to check emails on my break, along with a thermal bag with a can or two of diet Dr. Pepper and my New York Times if I have time on my break after checking email. I'm livin' large, baby!

Buying the backpack was a big step for me. As if two semesters of being a college student again in my late forties wasn't enough to say I'm committed to this. But buying the backpack meant that this is really happening.

And how is it going? I got an A on my Biology midterm, and had a high B in Chemistry. In our conference, my Chemistry professor told me that she felt that if I picked it up some, I could get an A for the course. When she, a notorious hardass, handed my quiz back to me the other day, she half-kiddingly chided me for missing one question and ruining my perfect score. I still got an A on that quiz. Let's hope I can pull that off on the test tomorrow.

One thing I realized, after getting my quiz back on Wednesday, was that my professor always puts me and two other students in another part of the room during tests and quizzes. I didn't notice until the quiz last Monday that it was always the same three of us-- the three that actually understand the material. It dawned on me that she's doing it because she doesn't want the other students in the class copying off of us. I'll take that as word that I'm doing well.