March 14
I’d had to set an alarm to make sure I woke up on time. I had trouble getting to sleep because my body told me it wasn't bedtime yet, and then I kept waking up because I was nervous that I was going to miss my exam.
It was not a good start to the day.
I cut my flying short—I didn't trust myself to judge the sun's position—and stretched my shower long in the hopes that that would help shake the rest of the cobwebs in my brain loose. But it didn't help at all.
Whoever decided to schedule exams right after changing the time was cruel.
Breakfast was eaten more out of a sense of obligation than any actual desire . . . I knew that if I went into my exam hungry, I'd do badly. And I was afraid that I was going to forget everything that I'd studied by the time the exam started.
By the time class started I was a nervous wreck, and I wanted to just fly away and hide on a cloud. I was convinced that I'd fail. I could think of a hundred ways that I could screw it up. At least sleeping through class wasn't a possibility any more.
The professor welcomed us to the exam, and walked around passing out tests. I leaned down and wrote my name on mine, then paused to build up my courage.
It was completely unnerving as we started taking the test there was no noise except for the scratching of pens and pencils on paper, and the occasional screeching of a chair being moved or somebody coughing quietly.
But when I finally started to focus in on the exam, it wasn't actually all that hard. Going over the vocabulary again and again had made it stick in my memory—some words more than others. Noctilucent clouds now had a special association for me.
I finished well before the three hours we'd been allotted, read through all the questions and answers again to make sure I hadn't made any dumb mistakes, and then turned it in. We were free to go once we were done, so I quietly thanked the professor for his class, and then walked out of the classroom.
I took a brief victory flight over campus—not high enough that I needed my flight gear—and then landed right back where I'd began, flicking my tail occasionally as I looked at Mandelle Hall. Finally, I made my decision and went inside.
The registrar's office was one floor up, and I boldly went up to the counter. Once she finally saw me, a woman I didn't know came up and asked if she could help me, and I told her that I wanted to change what classes I was taking next semester if that wasn’t too much trouble.
It turned out it wasn't that difficult to do. But she said that I wouldn't officially be changed until Conrad agreed to take me in his class; he already had the maximum number of students. I thought he would—I hoped he would. Another poetry class would be more useful to me than computer science.
Lunch was pretty quiet. Some people were still recovering from their morning exam, and others had just gotten up for the day. Nobody wanted to say too much. Sean was looking over his notes, and Joe had a vaguely haunted look in his eyes. I guess his exam hadn't gone very well.
I stayed at the dining hall longer than I normally would have, because I didn't have to hurry to get to Equestrian class. The teacher had sent me a computer mail saying that she was going to do the written exam first and then the oral exam, so I didn't need to show up until three pm.
I'd run out of things to do by two: all my friends were gone from the dining hall, and while I probably could have eaten another piece of pie, I knew that I shouldn't. Even if I deserved it for winning my first final exam. So I sat out on the quad and made myself a little snow nest and then sat in it and relaxed a bit.
That was kind of a mistake; as much shaking as I did didn't dislodge all of the snow, and I still had some clinging to my ruff and melting on the floor when we started the oral exam.
I don't know how teachers get so good at not reacting when students get things wrong. I know there were a couple of times when somebody mispronounced a word so badly I pinned my ears back, and they saw it, too. Then they got flustered and had a hard time getting back on track.
It was really hard to be fair when my friends were taking their turns. Luckily for me, Meghan was really good; she'd obviously been practicing a lot. Becky was pretty good, too, and Lisa was the worst. But she was still better than a lot of students. I bet they would have all been better if they’d been practicing with me—I could have been speaking Equestrian when I was over at their room watching Harry Potter or just hanging out.
When the last person had finished, the professor and I discussed their results. I'd picked up on some stuff they'd gotten wrong that she hadn't noticed, and it turned out that she'd accidentally taught them the wrong past tense of gallop, and hadn't been as clear as she ought to have been on what was considered a formal name for a pony.
I understood that, though. Humans usually use their second names when they want to be formal and their first names when they want to be friendly, but for ponies it doesn't always work like that. There are a lot of regional influences, and you've got to pay attention to get it right.
So I was glad that we'd taken the time to talk it over, because some of the mistakes I'd caught weren't really the students' fault, and shouldn't be counted against them.
By the time I got back to my dorm room, I was completely worn out, so I stretched out on bed with the intention of taking a short nap. When I woke back up, though, I'd completely missed dinner.
Peggy helped me order a pizza, and she traded me some beer for a few slices, and we sat on my bed together and ate pizza and drank beer to unwind from the day. Tomorrow was going to be a better day, because I was going to finish my essay in the morning and then take the poetry test in the afternoon.
I am saddened at the loss of the prospect of seeing Silver's view of the absolutely arcane chicanery that is the inner workings of the world of computing, but comforted by the promise of more time spent with Best Poetry Prof.
In a just and fair world, this would've been covered by the Geneva Convention.
That sentence blew my mind a little. But for a hooved cultural ambassador, it might actually be true.
I agree with Silver on this one, especially since I was in her horseshoes when I was growing up. For some reason, our school district always, always, ALWAYS scheduled our standardized tests right after the spring time change. In fact, I'll do 7200367 one better and say that doing so goes against the Eighth Amendment's protections against cruel and unusual punishment, as well as the federal anti-torture statutes.
media4.giphy.com/media/asHT7eh4AwG9G/200_s.gif
What, they don't do end-of-course student evaluations of the professor and TAs at the college Silver goes to?
And thus, any students who were walking right behind Silver at that moment got a free show.
I am incensed! Incensed, I say!
I wonder if he's going to refuse and tell her that she shouldn't dismiss new horizons so cavalierly, though? Conrad seems like he's a right and proper teacher, so I could see it. (In that case, she might want to check out the poetry club if it exists. Or maybe just visit his office hours to chat- hardly anyone ever shows up to those!)
Well, I've never heard of a noctilucent cloud, but if my Latin is correct I'd guess it's a cloud that glows at night. Possibly the origin of Silver Glow's name?
Heh. That's an interesting way of putting it.
Also, very believable flubs in the Equestrian class. It's a whole new language devised by a completely different species. The teachers are still learning it themselves this early in the process.
7200397
Yeah, one of the few contexts where that sentence makes any kind of sense.
7200399
...as did the ones who watched her flying, and the ones who saw her with a braid, and the ones who she towed around the ice slicks, and the ones who saw her on her morning trots, and especially the ones who saw her rolling in the snow...
Naked ponies have to be like free peep shows if you're paying any kind of attention; that yail can do only so much.
For a moment I wasn't sure what to think. Was it really a huge contradiction in the middle of the chapter.
And then I realised: she meant the worst of the three...
I felt stupid
So American universities have exams in March? Weird. Also, is Silver Glow staying for a whole year? Or is it typical to schedule your classes for next year during exams?
7200739
A minority (<20%) of American colleges and universities are on a quarter system. Kalamazoo College has a Fall quarter from mid-September to late November, a Winter quarter from early January to mid-March, and a Spring quarter from late March to early June.
Way to fail to usher in the cloud-computing revolution, Silver Glow.
...use magic to build tiny clouds that are only conductive in certain directions under certain conditions, pack them together in the right alignment, shoot lightning through them...
Scaling issues? You could fill the entire sky if you needed to, and build a city right on top of it. Cloudsdale could be the most powerful computing network in either world.
edit: And that's not even getting into the things that could be done with foglets.
I have a question, and thi is really more of a question for not Admiral: are american post secondary places actually run like this? Or is this just a weird outlier?
7198402
like the kobolt godess ?
7200932 you were to long in minecraft when ...
why wouldn't she do something with computers ? and what are her classes on the next term ?
7200926
And a summer break that's barely 3 months? Ouch. And those are some short courses. What can you learn in two months?
7199144
Pretty near anything they want.
(Probably right up until somepony - or some depowered dragonequus - sows a little disharmony between the two of them - asking questions like why Starlight still needs Trixie around, and whether Trixie feels inadequate next to Starlight's arcane power or not)
7201020 Many schools would have two quarters making up one semester/term, with most classes using the entire semester. Some classes - special interest classes, snow sports PE classes, seminars, remedials - might be quarterly (or miniterm) or shorter. That's been the case at every college I've attended and all the ones I've heard of through friends, though quarterly classes sound plausible. Perhaps it's a regional difference.
In high school, some schools use a six period? day and maintain that schedule through the year, while others have four blocks and change to four other blocks around Christmas. Some elementary schools use a year-round schedule with multiple shorter breaks, while others have a traditional months-long summer. There's no nationwide standard.
7200360
7200397
7200403
Yeah, it will only be more useful if Equestria doesn't start importing computers. On the other hand, by the time they had enough computers that it would be worth learning, most of the things she would have learned in the present would be out of date.
7200932
That sounds awesome, although it probably wouldn't be more efficient than the old vacuum tube computers. Having space in the sky to place it though should help make up for it.
7201370
That's... not actually true at all. It's a fairly common misconception, though.
The sad part is i have a final exam today and im not looking forward to it.
For some reason I can' sleep before a 7 AM final. All other times are fine, it's really weird.
I'd love to see SIlver bashing her head against the wall trying to understand computer programming. It's also so foreign to me to prefer poetry over CS, it blows my mind.
I also love SIlver's naive/innocent dialogue. "I won my final" it's adorable.
7201138 semester summer breaks are shorter. My friends who go to a semester school have a summer break from mid june to mid august while I have a full three month break. The classes also cover slightly less. My semester friend took two calc classes and I needed three to get the same material. it is really fast passed though.
7200360
Conrad is best poetry prof.
7200367
Agreed. Didn't DST used to start later in the year and end earlier? I feel that moved the starting and ending dates somewhat recently.
7200397
Plus, there probably aren't any/aren't many computers in Equestria, and Silver Glow isn't looking for a career as a computer repairpony anyway.
7200399
That is cruel. I'm pretty sure that at K, the exams didn't used to be right after the time change, then someone changed when the change happened. . . .
I don't recall that we did. We also didn't have TAs--that was one thing that the college made a big deal about.
By now, pretty much any student or faculty who wants a free show has gotten one, or several. Anyone who didn't want one has gotten one anyways, and maybe learned not to walk behind her.
7201616
Those are some weird semesters, then. When I was in Uni, the summer break was late April- Early September, depending of course on the date of your last final and whenever the next academic year started that year.
7200403
Probably not. If she wants to take more poetry classes, that's her choice. If she hasn't got a desire to get into the nascent computer industry in Equestria (if there's one at all), the class might not be all that useful to her anyway.
7200420
You're pretty much on the money about the Latin. They're high clouds at the top of the mesosphere, and they can only be seen at dusk and dawn, when the sun is below them (from the point of view of the observer). If modern science is correct, there probably aren't any in Equestria: they appear to have been caused by the industrial revolution. None of them were observed prior to the mid-1800s. Silver Glow was not named for them.
7200528
Thank you!
7200550
The one advantage ponies have--even if they normally hold their tails as high as they do in the show--is that they're short enough that it would still block the view for a human, mostly.
Unless, of course, it's a pegasus who flies around all the time.
7200667
I wasn't that tired when I wrote the chapter.
7200739 7200926
Kalamazoo College used to have a summer quarter as well, but that was in its last year or so when I went there, and I don't think they ever brought it back.
7200932
That would be an interesting system, if it worked. I somehow imagine a lazy weather pegasus screwing it up when she decided to get a lightning cloud from the closest source, and accidentally wipes out all of the Equestria Revenue Service's records.
7201020
Like this in what way? The three (formerly four) quarter system? Letting students change their classes?
7201648 hmm, that's interesting. Most US semester schools get something like a 5 week christmas break, but we do go to school a lot. Personally I prefer quarters over semesters.
7201025
Sort of, but I think that ponies probably are worth something when they're still alive.
7201138
Most classes had 30 hours of classroom time, plus labs (in some), plus a fair bit of homework. So a full course load was probably over 300 hours of classroom time per school year, plus various extracurricular activities that were part of your major (since I was a Theatre major, I had to work on the productions (which wasn't counted as class time), so that was another twenty or so hours a week.
The summer break was usually from the second week in June to the third week in September, so just over three months.
7201296
Well, I think I see what the season finale might be.
7201370
Plus she's got her weather wheel, so what use does she really have for a computer anyway?
7200420
Bleh, 7201656 stole my thunder. Oh well....
While Silver Glow might not be named for them, natural Noctilucent Clouds do tend to glow a sort of pale blue-silver. Ones formed from the exhaust of rocket launches can show other colors, since their more uniform consistency allows for iridescent effects (similar to rainbows, though the exact details are obviously different).
7201694 I'm mechanical engineering so I do more labs, projects, and assignments and less in class time. I have 19 hours of lecture, 6 hours of labs and maybe 30 hours of homework, pre and post labs and projects. No time for extra curricular activities. It's also pretty common for MEs to take 5 years.
7201671
The quarter system is seriously unusual to me. Until I started reading this story I've never even heard of it up here in Canada.
I feel ya Silver. We all get pre exam jitters.
7201642 They did extend the dates for DST a few years ago. I know this because I had to write a function at my last job that translated a UTC date-time to the correct local time for events going back several years, and I had to account for the change based on what year it was. The function was breaking for dates before 2007, which is when it changed from the first Sunday in April-last Sunday in October to last Sunday in March-first Sunday in November.
7201883 Same, my ex only had 2 semesters a year at Mac.
7201656
Well... trotting might not be too bad, since it's mostly up and down. Cantering or galloping? I suppose it depends on how low the pony's streaming tail is. But regular walking is gonna' send that high-held tail swinging wide like crazy.
Unless there's some ingrained pony mannerism to counter swing and minimize it. Which is a possibility. Never heard anyone mention such a thing though.
Ideeeeeeeaaaa!
7200367
In a just and fair world, daylight savings time wouldn't exist.
7200360
Conrad may soon find himself in demand for an online course that has an exceptionally diverse population of learners.
7201648
My experience with semesters is that Fall usually runs from mid-late August to early-mid December, Spring usually runs from early-mid January to early-mid May, and summer semesters are...fun. At my university, there are actually two summer sessions, each six weeks long (or eight weeks for the second, if you're taking a physics class over the summer). Summer classes meet for 2-3 hours a day, 4-5 days a week. Now that's fast paced (and I love it).
7201642
It was standardized to begin on the last Sunday in April and end on the last Sunday in October in 1966. In 1986, it was extended to begin on the first Sunday in April. In 2005, it was extended in both directions, to begin on the second Sunday in March and end on the first Sunday in November. This isn't actually the longest it's been, though. The longest DST was started on the second Monday of February and ended on the last Sunday of September...three calendar years later (this was from 1942-1945, which might provide a hint as to the rationale).
On a different note, TAs are great when properly applied. My university puts everyone in reasonably sized classes (with the exception of first-year chemistry and physics, class sizes are limited to around 30-35 per section), but TAs run recitations (very helpful) and proctor common exams (they are administered to the same sections, but all at the same time, and the professors can't be in every room at once), not to mention lightening the grading load (leading to prompt return of coursework), and have their own office hours (which is great when the professor's office hours conflict with other classes).
7201656
Technically, my own industry is chemicals. Only a small fraction of a percent of people programming computers are in the computer industry. Computers are a means to an end, the ultimate pure-logic tool. The trajectory of her career sounds like regional weather manager, right? Seems like a job that would benefit from knowing the workings of an inconceivably powerful and ubiquitous calculator.
Wait, is that what you think they teach in CS courses? ...No, there's no way you think that.
7201885 Oh god, you had to deal with time-related code. I'm so sorry.
7200528
Seems a very pegasus way of putting it to me.
7202937 It is kind of silly when a unicorn can do a day's work for an earth pony in 10 seconds.
I'm going to go cry now. THIS IS THE WORST POSSIBLE THING!
7201470
Now that we're a couple of days on, how did it go?
7201600
I have trouble with it sometimes, too. And, in a nice dose of coincidence, the night after I wrote this chapter I barely could sleep at all.
7201784
Theatre had a lot of that, too. Maybe ten hours of actual class time per week, and then an ungodly amount of homework and 'lab' work (doing tech for a show, or building sets, or acting, etc.). One of my assignments in playwriting class turned out to be eighty pages long, and the number of light plots I drew. . . .
7201883
I think it's probably because you're metric. You'd have the tenths system
7201885
Oh, that's got to be awful. Plus in computer timekeeping they've got to account for leap seconds and all that other fun stuff, too, right?
7201926
Unless there's some ingrained pony mannerism to counter swing and minimize it. Which is a possibility. Never heard anyone mention such a thing though.
I doubt it. I really don't think they care.
There was some top-down walking animation in one of the Rarity eps; I'll have to look at it and see what she's doing with her tail.
7202321
It would be even more perfect if it was a course by mail.
My English senior project (a novel) was actually mailed back and forth between me and the professor, since I did it over the summer and she was in California.
7202451
Besides some of the introductory classes, we usually had really small classes. My theater senior seminar class had five, my English senior seminar class had eleven. . . .
7202536
It would really depend on when that technology got to Equestria, though. If Silver Glow learns some rudimentary programming (for example), what good would it do her when she went back to Equestria?
I guess I can see how some of the logic (depending on how they teach it) might prove to be useful, and if Equestria eventually gets computers, of course that knowledge will be helpful, but I'm not sold on its usefulness to Silver Glow, or if Silver would see any advantage to having the class.
Honestly, I have no idea what they teach in CS courses these days. I'd assume these days it's website design, programming, network-related stuff, probably some classes in logic and/or algorithms (which might more properly be classed as math).
The only language I know how to program in is BASIC. And I've probably forgotten most of that now.
7202950
But maybe they can't do it as well. Otherwise why didn't the unicorns just grow their own food pre-unification?
7205793
Can you imagine poor Silver trying to program a computer either using iffy voice commands, or typing out one letter at a time with a pencil held in her mouth?
Well, it seems that Silver has gone through her first set of exams without much problems.
CompSci is poetry.
Just ask Lord Byron's daughter who invented it.
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http://sydneypadua.com/2dgoggles/lovelace-the-origin-2/