I learned how to poke myself on Facebook.

In other news, I'm leaving for home tomorrow—as soon as I take my last math midterm. In high school, our grades for each course were independent of midterms and finals. (They had their own column on report cards.) You could do pretty badly on them without your grade taking a hit. But in my math class, midterms and finals are worth 80% of my grade, with quizzes being the other 20%. I love this, especially because it makes homework optional, and I tend to do well on math tests.

At the beginning of the quarter, I'd devote a few hours to political science homework. For each class, we're assigned about 50 pages that we might or might not be quizzed on. So I overprepared. It wasn't until recently that I learned how much I could slack off and still be fine. I have class at 3:30 today and I don't even know what the reading is yet. And you know what? I'll look it over, answer the study guide questions, and be completely fine in the event of a quiz.

Learning how much I can slack off without immediate impact on my grade has been the most important thing I've learned so far. It takes me longer than most people to figure out, but I still get there…eventually.