The Only Ones Who Should Shoot…

Thursday, January 27, 2011

The Only Ones Who Should Shoot…

Dear Followers,

Disbelief. I didn’t think the day would ever come. APCOMP is over. The dragon is slain. All that’s left is to collect her valuable treasure before quietly exiting out the back door, leaving the carcass behind to rot.

Oh yeah, there is an AP test in May. FML.

Cardona-san may be one of the cleverest teachers I know. In many ways she is the closest I have come to finding a real-life Lelouch Lamperouge. She rules her classroom with an iron first and she doesn’t care who knows. She thrives on the moans and mumbles of her students. She will constantly remind even the more literate student that he or she does, indeed, not know how to read. As Jason Lee would say, “you don’t have to like her, but you will respect her.”

I can remember my first day in Cardona-san’s room. Following a prolonged APUSH introduction with Mr. Goodrich, I sauntered in and found my seat. After finding a few friends, I took my seat before I was handed a 4 page syllabus. On the first read through I knew that this was going to be a long semester. Where’s the KY?

Perhaps one of the reasons why I despise Cardona-san so much is because she makes me use my brain. Where is the cut-and-paste homework assignment? Where is the easy to follow syllabus? Where is the project rubric that will allow me to get away with an A with the least amount of work possible? Indeed, in Cardona-san’s class I was always on edge, always forced to work, always forced to go the extra mile.

The past 5 months have been some of the most stressful of my life. When I wasn’t eating, sleeping, or using the toilet, I was annotating, annotating, annotating. The number of nights that I had to forgo catching up on Darker Than Black because I was busy “annotizing” were uncountable. I had never been so frustrated in my life, in a condition of chronic uncertainty. Well, that was what I was constantly telling myself. I always am amazed at how carefree a class seems in hindsight. I was never even close to failing.

As Cardona-san will soon find out when she grades the writing section of the final, I hate writing with a passion. Why? I suck at writing. Well, I suck at writing in a relative sense (in comparison to Cozy’s godly writing techniques). Hell, I don’t know what a zeugma is even today. Even though I hate writing, Cardona-san made me want to improve. You sly dog, Cardona-san. I honestly wanted to shove an essay with an A in her face and just yell “WHAT NOW CARDONA-SAN, WHAT NOW?”

I am not going to lie, I will miss APCOMP. The number of times I found myself laughing uncontrollably in that class is in the hundreds. I don’t think any other teacher in the school would let me rant about Nietzsche, rag Bradley Dawson for 86 minutes every day, or engage in my usual shenanigans. So I guess all I have to say is thank you Cardona-san for a memorable semester. T-shirts are in productions. Be ready.