Beside Myself with Excitement

I have told everyone I know. I have posted it on Facebook. I have written many e-mails. And finally, here, the final and irrefutable culmination of my awesomeness. Drumroll, bitte!

I shall most likely graduate with a 3.95 GPA.

Summa. Highest honors.

Breathe, Jeanette, breathe.

Now, this is, of course, not set in stone as of yet. I have these last four classes to complete. As it stands right now, I have a 3.95 even. If I make four A's, which I think I might just be able to do, I shall have a 3.954545... or something like that. I forget the exact number that the online GPA calculator gave me.

This brings me to a discussion of my hatred of math. I found the formula for calculating your GPA. You add up two totals: the total credit hours and the number of points you received for each class. A three hour class gives a total of 12 points if you get an A. With a B you get 9. I'm not sure what you get with a C (I have never gotten a C) but following this same pattern I would assume you would get 6 points and with a D you would earn 3.

The final step is to divide your total points by the total hours.

Now, I did this with pen and paper. Somewhere a number was off, because I did not get the optimistic 3.95 that the computer tells me. I came up with 3.86 (which is not Summa, but Magna: still an awesome feat but clearly it's just not the same). I hate math because you make a tiny mistake in an early part of the equation and the entire thing becomes skewed.

It reminds me of an old "Bloom County" strip. The smart kid, I believe his name is Oliver Wendell, figures out mathematically just how everything in the universe could exist. But in reading over his numbers, he notices that it explains everything except the existence of penguins. At this point, Opus the penguin begins to disappear. Oliver, oblivious, looks over his math as Opus loses first his feet, then his midsection, until the only thing left is one hand holding his ice cream cone. Then, suddenly, Oliver says, "Oh wait. Forgot to carry the two." He scribbles and fixes his math, and a frazzled, bedraggled Opus reappears, his ice cream cone atop his legendary nose, as he says "You stop that!"

My heartfelt thanks to Berke Breathed for wonderfully illustrating my point.

Math, ill-calculated in the wrong hands, can be a dangerous thing.