Final marking period of my senior year of high school in a class called Math 12X - a little bit of this, a little bit of that. The final quarter was an introduction to calculus. The teacher handed us a small black book and said, “Here - this is all self-explanatory.”
She was wrong. Very, very wrong. This was 1969, and report cards were still marked by hand. My school had the obnoxious habit of marking Fs in red ink to they really stood out. My mother was horrified, and quite certain that the colleges that had accepted me were going to change their minds. They did not.
The summer after I finished nursing school, I made the mistake of taking 2 semesters of organic chem in 8 weeks of summer school. I thought I wanted to go to med school, and, of course, you needed organic, and nothing less than an A would do. I barely managed a C, and only because of the generous curve. This was 1973. For decades, I had tortuous dreams in which it is the end of the semester, and I have done none of the homework or labs, and am frantically hoping I can still withdraw. I remember Kekule figuring out the 6 carbon ring by dreaming about a snake holding its tail in its mouth, what -cis and -trans means, that -OH means an alcohol, saponification means making soap, and the name of the text book - Morrison and Boyd. Nothing else. Absolutely nothing else.
Watch me have that damn dream tonight- 
Edit history
= new reply since forum marked as read
