Lurking in my own Life…

I feel like I’m sleepwalking these days – getting over the exhaustion of my trip, dealing with the projects that all seem to have deadlines the same week (two sweaters, a necklace and a bunch of art stuff for the South Orange Craft Fair due the first week of Dec) – Did I fail to mention design submission deadlines for several publications the first week in Dec, too? Oh, and for good measure let’s throw in Thanksgiving (we’re doing NOTHING, I’m just too tired) and Hannukah (we’re not doing a lot – although we are having some neighborhood kids over to “show them what we do” the weekend after T-day).

Okay, having said all of that I have SO much to be thankful for this year – believe me, I’d feel very lucky to be able moan about how busy I am – so much better than the alternative. Now if we could only see the dollar bills following the work! And I apologize in advance for the long diatribe on my Real Estate Class and my total lack of knitting chat in this blog entry!

Did I mention that my final exams for my Real Estate class are on Monday and Wednesday?

Warning – Real Estate Teacher Vent

This woman is just beyond endurance. Well, not actually, because I am enduring this class, but I’m not learning a whole hell of a lot from her. Last Monday we had was was supposed to have been a ‘practice’ exam. Guess what? It was the WRONG exam! It was a BROKERS exam, not a SALESPERSON LICENSING exam, and was filled with a lot of important stuff that falls under the category ‘This will NOT be on the State Licensing Exam so why are we cramming it into our heads?’

I got 60 correct out of 110 (that’s 54% for our audience at home) and I did better than most folks in the class. Yikes! I think our teacher just screwed up and brought us in the wrong test, then was too stubborn to admit she’d made a mistake.

On Wednesday we had another practice exam (I passed, just BARELY) that was, thankfully, on stuff that we DO need to know. It was heavily skewed toward agency law, but that’s good for me because I’m good on the math and could use some extra help with the legal stuff. After the test she quizzed us on a series of questions from another test and we answered orally. Some of the answers just did NOT compute, and it was so confusing because – for example – I KNEW that Capital Gains are taxable as income but Equity is not. But she insisted that Equity, in answer to that question, was income taxable. So confusing.

This went on for about 20 minutes, with the class getting more dejected and demoralized about our total lack of comprehension of this topic, when she discovered that she’d been using the WRONG ANSWER KEY. Okay – number one: Why didn’t she REALIZE that the answers were wrong based on her own experience??? Number two: she didn’t actually ANNOUCE that she had the wrong key, just surreptitiously shuffled her papers and the news trickled back to the class that – DUH – the answers she was insisting were correct were just plain wrong.

Then she began asking the same questions over, which was even more confusing. When half of the class would answer with the right answer, the other class would insist it was the answer we had just learned was ‘really’ correct 20 minutes earlier, and she didn’t have the clarity to step in and say, “X, Y & Z are the true correct answers…” Just letting us flail around in the class trying to figure out which answer was really correct.

As she is a licensed broker/salesperson, one wonders whether it really is in her best interest to have more licensed salespeople out there. Is this just a clever ploy to reduce the competition?