strong accents

When I was a freshman, I attended a semester's worth of Calculus 2 (typically series/summation) lectures wherein my professor never ONCE made eye contact with a single member of the students in attendance. His english was also only 80% interpretable, so you were left writing down what you thought were polysyllabic, technical words and then "internet searching" them later, with mixed results. Smartphones were not a thing, and Google had not rose to total dominance yet ('06). Edit: This experience is one unfortunate product of the "tenure track" university model.

Long story short, I ended up paying $20 to a third-party tutoring organization with "classrooms" in a strip center mall, where a presumably coked-up "tutor" explained to us exactly what each professor of the attendees would have on their exams, based upon previous known exam samples. One tutor was named "Arf" (no, seriously), and I wrote a poem about him, something titled like "I'm an onomatopoeia!", written from the perspective of a dog, I think. Everything about this paragraph is kind of fucked up, in retrospect.

So that's how I got B's in my intro classes. Attending lectures held at/by the actual university were often useless, and you could just cram everything in during one or two nights via a third party. Major downside: you load much of this knowledge into the human analog of RAM, and then the files are mostly deleted after the exam. Only upside was course credit, which, if it wasn't obvious by now, can sometimes mean practically nothing. Still, with higher education (graduate degrees and beyond), this isn't the case, and you're thinking at a high enough level to stimulate neurogenesis or whatever. Instilling a thirst for knowledge or some other purpose can motivate the body to make it through some fucked up shit.

Cheers. :)