Numb3rs is Not a Legitimate Way to Study for a Math Test

Lesson of the day.
Good thing my grades don't count, because at least two of my answers (on a test that had all of 9 questions) were "I have no clue what you are asking. I am going to write some numbers down so that you can see that I have basic math skills, but I am fairly certain they have nothing to do with the assigned problem (auf Deutsch)." And then I drew a cheerful Santa at the bottom of the page.
At least the math test had free chocolate.

I kept a diary during the final twenty minutes of the math test so you could see my thought process as I struggled through having no clue what to do, and also so it would look like I was working, since I was in the front row.
10 am
I have sort of tried to do 2 and a half problems and I am so ready to stop and draw pictures of bunnies. I have a terrible headache and my throat is kind of sore- I feel like I'm getting sick, which doesn't help.
10:03 am
You know what was awesome? Word problems. Man, I miss those. The complicated ones where you had to draw a picture of a guy flying a kite between a tower and a tree and figure out all the angles or whatever. . . those always made me feel like math had a purpose.
10:07 am
It's not cool to be the only person in the room not trying to do math. . . but I seriously don't know how to start, and I wrote that down. May I have a cup of tea now?
10:15 am
With 5 minutes to go, I have written "something" for every question, even if it is just "I have no clue what I am doing." I have tried very hard to do something with numbers as well. Now I will draw a picture to make it seem better!

So I was always planning on publishing this diary, and it was supposed to get really desperate and crazy at the end, but it turns out that I'm better at starting out desperate and then learning to deal with the situation and do something productive. That's probably a nice moral, but it's terrible literature. I apologize. (Speaking of diaries where people slowly go crazy, "Edith's Diary" is actually a really boring book, which disappoints me because Patricia Highsmith is otherwise about as awesome as it gets. I don't know if I should read the final 100 pages or not. Anyone know better than me?) (Oh, in case you're worried, my headache went away.)

It is St Nikolaus Day, in case you were unaware (how could you be? I mean, if you're Jewish or something, I guess you could be unaware.) and that means the Noiby and Co (Maria, Berni, Max, etc) dress up like important Christmas characters and wander through the school during first period, giving chocolate to everyone. It is a very good tradition, especially because even cheap mass-produced German chocolate is amazing and delicious. It also means that Max and Gellie wore Santa hats the rest of the day, and that our math teacher gave us chocolate Santas to make us feel better about taking a math test.

Otherwise, a pretty normal school day and it is vaguely sunny out one window at the moment, and gray and menacing out another. The weather was vague- we are somewhere between the 0 and 4 degree section of Germany for tomorrow, and may or may not get something resembling either snow or rain. It's hard to tell with these crazy maps.

Fun trivia of the day: Bernard, Head Elf in the Santa Clause (which was today's lunchtime viewing for festive reasons), is played by the same actor who plays Charlie in Numb3rs! That was a pretty exciting find, although Christoph didn't want to believe us because "the guy from Numb3rs is too old- he's gotta be like 35 at least." Well, just because I want to gloat in being right publicly, imdb assures me that David Krumholtz (that is his name, people who live under a rock and never watch Numb3rs, which is multiple kinds of sacrilege) is 27, meaning he was 16 in 1994 when the Santa Clause came out, which is, in fact, exactly the age I guessed for him. I am always right.

More fun trivia: I have a copy of the German Constitution (hereforth referred to as "Grundgesetz") in English. It is 90 pages long, consists of 146 articles (and a 5-article appendix), and, as of 2000, has been ammended 49 times (at which point it was all of 51 years old). I found a copy of the American Constitution on the internet. The printer-friendly version (without ammendments, the text of which is also not exactly included in my Grundgesetz) is 9 pages long and the document has 7 articles. It has been ammended 27 times in 218 years. I don't know what this says about our comparative countries, but learning about the American Constitution is a whole lot easier.