May 09, 2006

Crab if you wanna.

I have a final today at 12:30 for Hunter-Gatherer Archaeology. This is the class in which, on the last day of lecture, the instructor apologetically announced that the next time he teaches this class he's going to cut the reading load down drastically. There's just a ton of material for the semester: a huge reader plus a bunch of articles from e-reserves which had to be printed out, article summaries presented in class, final presentations, and of course my notes. It's an open-book test. How the hell do you deal with an open-book test when you have 90 minutes to sift through 700 pages of material?

You index the everloving fuck out of it, that's how. My plan is to be able to find any article, author, or general theme within 15 seconds.

Posted by dianna at May 9, 2006 09:32 AM
Comments

pr0n for 3M shareholders.

Posted by: Erik at May 9, 2006 09:52 AM

Good luck! Show those hunter-gatherers what was what!

Posted by: Zach S. at May 9, 2006 10:56 AM

DIY brilliance. I note that in addition to your indexing, you also manufactured yourself manageably sized readerlets with duct-tape binding.

Posted by: katie at May 9, 2006 12:19 PM

It's true, although last night I put them all back together into one megareader since a) I was gonna have to carry them all anyway and b) when throwing piles of paper around on a tiny lecture-hall desk you really need fewer packets, not more.

It worked, by the way, and I feel my strategy has been thoroughly vindicated. I knew everything well enough to know what I was looking for, and the only crunch was getting everything together with enough time to write the essays, which, thanks to my indexing, I did.

Also, Zach, cute. Very cute. I did indeed show them what was, a few millennia ago, what. And one of my classmates actually thanked me for my final presentation because it had come in so handy for the essay question that required an example from a class project. If that isn't indicative of showing what's what, then by god, I don't know what is. Was. Whatever.

Posted by: Dianna at May 9, 2006 02:42 PM
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