Back at home, getting into bad habits (i.e. not sleeping until late - perhaps my body's always been on West Coast time).

Anyways, I was trying to go to sleep, when I was reminded of a story from my UNC days. It has no bearing on anything in my life, and doesn't serve any purpose, but it's stuck with me for a while, and I figure I'd share it. The details are already getting hazy, so it's a good chance I'll completely forget this within the next few years; better get it down while I can still remember parts of it!

My junior year at Carolina was when I started taking a heavy dose of non-major courses (basically anything besides economics or chemistry). One of those classes was CHIN050, which I believe was ancient Chinese history (or something along those lines). Basically we read a lot of books about ancient Chinese history.

One of our first papers was to analyze one of the ancient Chinese texts we had read and offer our insights into it (Yush, did you take this class? Do you remember what it was?). The professor seemed really cool and liberal and oozed that coolness that I hadn't seen yet from my chem or econ classes. So when he gave us some leeway into how we wrote it (and the opinions we took), I decided to write a satirical paper that criticized the text.

Bad move. I remember getting a horrible grade (I think it was a D or an F) with the note: "This paper is not college material." Oh snap. Obviously the professor was a bit offended that I decided to bash his life's research (even if I was just being satirical). After that, that class quickly fell into my list of uncool classes, and I stopped caring.

Of course, even when I don't care, I do show up for finals and turn in papers (unless it's a chemistry class, in which I'll knowingly skip the final, but that's a story for another day!). Before our final exam, we had one more paper to write. Freshly scarred from the academic smack-down I had gotten on the first paper, I wrote the most straight-laced paper ever. It was well organized, packed with facts and references, and incredibly boring. Basically one of those papers that'd do well on those "buy an essay sites."

Apparently this paper went over a lot better with the professor, cause he gave me a great grade on it (I think it was an A, but it coulda been a B).

But that wasn't the amazing thing. The professor followed up with an email the following week, apologizing for being so critical on my first paper (he realized I wasn't an idiot, I was just being satirical), and he retroactively changed the grade on the first paper to a B (I remember this grade exactly, cause the whole email struck me as kind of weird). I didn't even ask or anything! I had simply stopped caring about that class, and he remembered to go back and re-read my paper, and apologize for it. I was pretty impressed.