Tuesday, November 6, 2007

Todavía nerviosa

So, I'm only posting today because I committed myself to this NaBloPoMo nonsense. What a scam.

I met with my phonetics prof this afternoon, and after discussing my final project proposal with her (which she thought was cool, by the way, and gave me a couple of good pointers on data collection) I mentioned my fear of getting an unsatisfactory grade and having to repeat the class. She smiled weirdly and told me she didn't think I needed to worry about that. I protested that my department insists on higher grades. Still no need to worry, says she.

I ought to be relieved by that, but I'm not. I still don't understand acoustic phonetics, and I can't do the stats. Not entirely true, I guess-- I do that stats just fine. I am not challenged by entering data into a spreadsheet and coaxing means and standard deviations and p-values out of them. Not a problem. I just don't know what that p-value means, or what a two-tail t-test is (besides alliterative). How can I be confident that I'll perform swimmingly on the final exam when I don't understand the material?

Lola is not lulled into a false sense of security (but she sure wishes she were, dangit).

1 comment:

Jane said...

Maybe she was hinting for a bribe!