VEHICLES MUST YIELD TO PEDESTRIANS | IT'S THE LAW!!!!

About two weeks ago, I was nearly hit by an RTD bus on the corner of 2nd Place and Union in Lakewood, Colorado. Just to make sure that I was in the right, I asked my bus driver who had the right of way. He described several scenarios to me where a bus driver or other vehicle could drive in front of a pedestrian. He emphasized that, in any scenario, if a pedestrian crosses the median on a two-lane road, he MUST WAIT for the pedestrian to finish crossing. He also emphasized that this is the rule and LAW for any vehicle, whether it be a car, bus, truck, semi or motorcycle. Any vehicle must yield to a pedestrian in a crosswalk.

Fast forward to tonight... I was crossing using a crosswalk at the corner of 9th and Auraria in LoDo right next to the Auraria Campus. I had started crossing and almost got to the median when a car making a left-hand turn had to slam on its brakes to avoid hitting me because he didn't see me in the crosswalk. I was wearing a hot pink North Face jacket and was walking in the middle of the crosswalk at a well-lit intersection.

The most important thing the bus driver from before told me is that if you hit a pedestrian with your car, you automatically are at fault with almost no excuse otherwise. There is NO EXCUSE to hit a pedestrian because the pedestrian always has the right of way.

I'm not sure how many times I need to be nearly hit by a car and yelled at as if it were my fault when I'm following the pedestrian crossing laws and the vehicles aren't following traffic laws.

The next time you're at an intersection with a crosswalk, YIELD TO PEDESTRIANS! If you don't, you may end up hitting someone or worse, killing someone. If you do, it's manslaughter. Waiting a few seconds for a pedestrian to safely cross can potentially save a life and save you from heavy fines and life in a jail cell.

Deceiving Professors

Having spent four years earning a BA and this year working on prerequisites for an accelerated nursing program, I have had my fair share of all kinds of professors. I have had professors that spoon feed information like we're too dumb to learn any part of the course on our own. I had professors that barely taught and forced students to teach themselves everything, reducing the professor to a test proctor and assignment grader (if there were even assignments). I've also had a fair share of professors that made us read the book for tests but lectured on NOTHING IN THE BOOK. It's frustrating to be a student, especially in a country where education is moving farther and farther away from uniformity. What you learn in one school may be completely different from another! This varies from state to state, county to county and school to school (sometimes even in the same district).

I have gotten halfway through this semester and done pretty well. However, I have noticed that despite the stellar grades and the confidence in learning the material, I find that the stress I feel comes during homework assignments and, especially, during/after test. You may say that this is a normal feel, warranted because there is something on the line for me. I disagree, though. The reason I feel so uneasy at those specific times is because I have a very deceiving professor.

Deceiving professors are the ones that give you homework assignments with incredibly difficult problems to work through (even if they turn out to be easy once you understand how to solve it), tell you some of those problems will show up on the test, and then omit any questions like them on the test.

Walking out of my Chemistry test today, I found myself worrying that I had skipped a page or that I set up the problems that I found easy incorrectly. A friend in the class had the same thoughts during the test (a girl next to her also spilled coffee on her test). I don't have a lot of test anxiety most of the time. Today was no exception. My friend, however, told me that she almost didn't even feel like working on the last three problems of the test because she was so confused and overwhelmed. Why did she feel this way?

She felt that way because our professor led us to believe that the problems that caused us so much stress to solve on the homework, that she told us would show up on the test, never appeared. Instead, there was a slew of problems on the test that made only ONE appearance on the previous assignments and group problems.

While this particular professor does a great job of teaching the material and helping us understand it, I don't think she understands that her tests don't follow what she's telling us we're supposed to be prepared for on the test. On one hand, if we can solve the hardest problems before the test, we should be able to handle anything she serves us on the exam. On the other hand, we prepare and stress out about seeing the hard problems on the test and become paranoid that we aren't doing certain simpler problems correctly when the hard problems make no appearance on the test at all.

This is what I like to call a gift and a curse.