Organic chemistry evaluation, summer 1982, the year before I became disabled from a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI).

I have included my evaluation from organic chemistry to illustrate the expectations that I had for a lab assistant. They were standards that I met everyday before I was disabled.

In spring 2003, at Cabrillo college, I was required to take the Physics labs in addition to the lecture. I explained to the instructor that I had a degree in Biochemistry, I needed Physics for Chemistry 163A (Quantum Chemistry) at UC Santa Cruz and taking the lab was irrelevant to my goals. He would not allow me to take Physics without the lab. This, inspite of the fact that I specifically asked to avoid the lab.

I had some notion of how bad it going to be, but nobody was thinking of what would happen to my self esteem. The first time I started Physics 4A I did not have a lab assistant. What this meant for me was for three hours every week I sat on my butt, dwelling on feeling like a worthless piece of excrement, while people were doing stuff all around me. I wasn't involved with what they were doing, when I'd ask them, it was made plain that I needed to not bother them etc.. After about eight weeks of trying to write really crappy lab reports from memory, having the other students treating me like a freak I dropped the class. At that point I should have dropped out of school as I was feeling so bad about myself. I didn't and wound up getting a "D" in my other class - the first that has ever happened. That is the most depressed I have ever been - ever.

I tried Physics 4A again a year later. The instructor would not relent, he required me to take the lab, but this time I had an assistant. She dropped out school in the first week. The second assistant was really flakey. I got a taste of this when he disappeared from Wednesday's lecture without giving me a copy of the lecture notes. At Friday's lecture I asked what had happened, where were the notes, we needed to make sure this didn't happen again etc. He started complaining about work, time and the poor money he would be getting for his notes and assistance, said I was asking too much, refused to honor his commitment to take notes, to be my lab assistant and quit.

I remembered what a bad scene it had been when I had no assistant before. At the last minute this guy takes the job of being my lab assistant. I was hoping my troubles were over. He would write stuff that referred to data outside the notebook (I specifically asked him not to), do equations in his head and write down the results, I had to keep asking him to use pen, had to remind him he worked for me and to not disappear when on the job (He vanished for forty five minutes once) - it was a real drag to have to depend on this guy, but I had no other choice.

I took Physics 4B (electricity and magnetism) with lab in the fall of 2005. I had to drop Differential Equations because I had no help writing the homework or lab for physics. At the time I was not aware of why I felt so dumb and worthless. Physics was floundering along. Lab was pretty much a lost cause. I resigned myself to mediocre assistence, to being an obstacle to the other students, to not feeling a part of the class, to having a lab notebook that embarrassed me with all it's junky writing etc..

What is telling is that when I was taking class without the lab requirement I acheived the letter grade "A" twice, but when I was taking class concurrently with Physics (that had the lab requirement) my grade dropped from an "A" to a "B" in Organic chemistry and was a "W" in differential equations. Organic chemistry had a lab with the lecture too, but the instructor did not require me to take it.

Consequences I became aware that any lab assistance was a rare commodity and to make suggestions to improve the quality of their work was an invitation for the assistant to quit and then I would have to drop the class. These were the constraints I was operating under and was my stomach was constantly upset for the first time.