Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Prac Exam

So today I had my Plant Practical Exam for my plant productions class. We had to learn how to recognize 67 different grasses, crop plants, legumes, weeds, and herbs. I have spent the last 2 weeks in the paddocks behind our campus and have been putting together a notes page with pictures and descriptions since the exam was open note.

Somedays I feel like I'm in some pseudo life that I could watch on the television... today was one of those days.

9:30am- I went to the library after breakfast this morning to print off my notes page and when I went to print it, I didn't have enough money on my printing credit.

9:55am- I spent several more minutes making all of the pictures smaller and then printing again.

10:13am- It was confirmed, so walked over to the color printer and there were 2 people in front of me; one who was printing similar pages as me, and one who seemed to be copying an entire textbook!

10:24am- It's finally my turn at the printer and it prints out 2 pages at a time...very slowly, but very vibrantly.

10:28am- I run out of the library and into the rain and hail and pull my two hoods on to keep my buzzed head warm and dry.

10:30am- I get to my room, grab my notebook, plastic bag, pencils, Pastures and Forage Plants for New Zealand.

10:31am- I bolt out of my room and back into the rain to the pastures. When I got there, I saw 5 people standing in a cluster, all dressed with gumboots and long trench coats and they directed me inside the nearest warehouse to the side of the pastures. Our professor handed me the question sheet and I headed back out the door with 49 of my classmates.

(Why oh why did I have to grow up under the curse of Brunner Time?!?)

The exam was set up so that every other person was at a yellow peg and the others were at a blue peg. The pegs were spread out across 3 different paddocks. I started at a yellow peg, so at the sound of the whistle, I looked to the number disk on the peg, read the question on my sheet that said something like "Name the dominant grass" so I wrote down "Cocksfoot" or something correct like that! When the whistle blew one minute later, I moved to the blue peg where I could think about the plant I'd just seen and make sure I wrote down the right name. There were 25 questions in all. It was quite a nice exam, compared to stinking plant science essay tests.
It totally rocked looking around at all of the other people in my class:

(8 June 2010: Never came around to finishing this post! We'll just stop it there and let your imagination go wild!)