Evil scheduling gods at it again...

Why is registering for classes always so painful? Inevitably courses conflict with each other. Or they're full and you can't get in... I didn't have that problem at Stanford, but it reared its ugly head in highschool and now in grad school too.

My highschool's registration process was so archaic. We had "arena registration" in the auditorium, and got to go stand in lines to get classes during an english class. Not that it matters in highschool... It's not as if you actually get much of a choice in what to take... But they made us go through this ordeal because "that's what it was going to be like in college." Whatever! Everything was online in college, and I know it wasn't just because I went to school in Silicon Valley... Many other people had online registration too. (Except for Jenny, at first, but Northwestern eventually caught up. One way that Stanford is exceptional, however, is that you can request transcripts online too. Greatly facilitated my last minute NSF application since I wasn't exactly aware it was due so soon...)

My 16th birthday was probably my worst ever. We just happened to have registration on that day. Advanced Algebra III was only offered during 2 periods, and only 1 of them was an option for me, since the other conflicted with AP Government/Economics, which was only offered 1 period. Of course, by the time I got to the math table, they'd proclaimed that period to be full. It was such a load of shit though. There were only 23 students in it. But they were calling it a "lab class" because of the use of graphing calculators. The state provided extra funding to lab classes, provided they had no more than 23 students in them. I wonder what the state would have thought of calculators as the lab component?

So anyway, there were about 5 of us who they weren't letting in to that period. We decided to stage a sit-in strike in registration and refused to leave until they re-opened it. It eventually worked. The department head took pity on us and convinced the evil associate principal to relinquish the extra funding. Not as if that money would be going to the class anyway... Ah, corruption in the schools.... I must confess that I cried. Alas. Evil scheduling gods had their way, but we triumphed in the end. And as a result of the sit-in strike, we not only missed English, but most of Spanish as well!

At Stanford my biggest problem was that classes I wanted to take always conflicted with each other. Oh well. It ended up delaying several classes for me by a quarter or a year, and some just didn't get taken. That's alright. I'm content with my Stanford education.

At Stanford, as well as here at Davis, ballet seems to get the shaft. It's always taught over lunch, for whatever reason. I tended to have a class either directly before it, or right after it, which really made eating difficult. Rather than promote the whole anorexic ballerina thing, I frequently did not take ballet. Here, not only is ballet offered over lunch, it's only offered one quarter of the entire year. If that's not getting shafted, well, I don't know what is. So I was really excited that ballet quarter was coming up. And even more excited that it fits into my schedule. I figured, if I eat my lunch in the class before ballet, I'll be fine. But alas, it was not to be. There's a registration cap of 30, and I didn't make it. Poop poop poop! It's not adding me to the waitlist either, so maybe that's full too.

This really really really makes me sad. Lack of activity here has been driving me nuts. I need to dance like nothing else. And I miss ballet a lot. I haven't taken a ballet class in 2 years. So I'm hopelessly out of shape, and probably can't do much anymore, but I want to get back into it. It's such a great hobby. Oh well. The ballet teachers at Stanford were pretty cool, and would let you take the class even if you weren't registered for it. So maybe I'll go to the first class, and see if I can be allowed to "audit" it. Otherwise I might have to sacrifice my stinginess and look into taking ballet at a dance studio.