Newness this semester

Beccanomics is still sitting in the back of my mind, I just haven't had time to type it up and draw the graphs (yes, there are graphs involved!). Perhaps I'll get to it this weekend, but that depends on the distractions.

I've told numerous people that the most exciting thing about being back in school is perhaps the opportunities I have to walk and run daily. I park about a mile away from campus (which means I save on gas and don't have to buy a parking pass, and then walking on the amazing bike path next to the river for the rest of the way. This will be even more amazing when I have a bike up here and don't have to drive at all (it will take the same amount of time to bike to school as to drive and walk - perhaps less).

Also, along the river (which is 5 minutes away from the house), there are a ton of dirt paths. This is important because I can't run on pavement, or any hard surface without sending my back into spasms. So far this week I've been running four days in a row, and have yet to have more than minimal back pain (which I sometimes randomly get). Absolutely amazing. So pretty soon, friends, you'll have two people obsessing over running. Get used to it!

Some other newness is that I've finally found a way to make myself care about grades, and therefore to work for them. As an undergrad (and this is still true today), I could care less about grades because I don't think they appropriately reflect the amount of material learned. The point of a class should be to learn as much on the topic as you possibly can, and tests really don't serve a purpose rather than making people learn, but the good students should be doing that anyways. I much prefer papers to a bunch of tests (although in math and perhaps some science classes this isn't possible).

But this semester, I've let my competitiveness out in the classroom. In high school and undergrad, I didn't worry about getting the highest grade (for the reasons stated above, and also because I didn't want to set the grading standard too high for the people that were struggling [this was especially true in econ classes]), but now I've decided that there is no possible way that some little peon (my new term for undergrads) is going to get a higher grade than me, and they can all wallow in misery when I set the standard so high that they get C's (although in reality, if that were the case, the prof would probably throw out my grade and set a lower standard). I think that this will easily translate into a competition with other grad students, although we'll have to see. So far, it looks like my plan is working in at least one class, and that's the class that I think I'm going to be most competitive about, because it's my favorite. I haven't gotten enough graded feedback to know about the other classes.

In History of Economic Thought, at least, I think I'll offer to study with people, and although this might seem even more condescending, and it's not meant like that. We'll have to see.