I will not leave you Ruthless

I was out of town most of the week (on likely the best vacation of my adult life; I'll chronicle it on this blog in at least some capacity next week), and am playing catch-up on work and church and TV things, so this post will be pretty short.

This week in Gospel Doctrine we learn about Naomi, Ruth, and Boaz, plus Hannah, Eli, and Samuel. The title of this post is an amalgam of a well-known verse from the Gospel of John and an awful Bible pun (not like the "awesome" Bible puns I included in my last post).

The pun I'm referring to was made frequently by one of my religion professors at BYU, and indirectly cost me thousands of dollars. Here's how I described it on my old blog back in 2009:

For a few of the job applications I've filled out recently, I've had to include my college GPA. One even asked for a year-by-year GPA, which meant I checked out my transcript for the first time in a while. I was remarkably consistent in college--I had a cumulative 3.89 GPA, yet never had a semester with a 4.0. It reminds me of the time I took Julie Camp to the Christmas Dance in high school. We went bowling before the dance, and Julie got a 79 without a single spare or strike. Now that's consistency. 

My lowest GPA for a semester was 3.64, due mainly to the C+ I "achieved" in my Old Testament class--my worst grade ever at any level. The C+ was my fault, though at the time I blamed my professor. He made awful jokes, all the time, the same ones over and over again (like calling the fourth book of Moses "Leave it to cuss," or talking about how grateful he was for the Book of Ruth, because "it would be a shame to be Ruthless"). I've made my share of bad jokes before, but I'm usually aware that they're bad, and I haven't been a serial joke-repeater since my childhood "Why did the fishermen go fishing?" days. 

Even worse, he gave a quiz every day, and then we graded our own quizzes in class. That means I'd have to suffer through "if I put [something vaguely related], can I get half credit?" types of questions every time. This process took at least 15 minutes in each class, and since we only had two 50-minute sessions a week to begin with to cover about 800 pages of OT curriculum, and since it was an 8 AM class, I gave in to my frustration and skipped almost half of the classes. Since I wasn't there to take the quizzes, my grade slipped down past the Bs. 

For my first few years of college, I had a grade-based full tuition scholarship, which I got one year at a time, and then it would be renewed if my grades were good enough. My grades, as stated above, were good, but so were my classmates' (Communications is a pretty easy major, I'll readily admit that), and that fall my GPA was one-hundredth of a point below the cutoff for full tuition, and I got a half tuition scholarship instead. 

So, my laziness or stubbornness or whatever you want to call it in relation to my Old Testament class cost me about $1600 (BYU is remarkably cheap compared to other schools, isn't it?). I ended up receiving a departmental scholarship that covered the rest of my tuition, but I probably would've got that anyway, and could've used that money for any number of other things. Pretty frustrating, and I only have myself to blame.

That college 4.0 has remained elusive since my return to academia last year, as I got a single A- in my first semester back and two of them in my most recent term. Someday...but anyway, how about that Ruth pun?  Pretty Samuel the LAME-anite, am I right? Well, jokes aside, you still have some time before class to study about Samuel, Boaz, and some of the most impressive women in all of scripture. See you Sunday!