CS 502 was ``The Class to End All Classes'' just as WW I was ``The War to End All Wars.CS 502 was ``The Class to End All Classes'' just as WW I was ``The War to End All Wars.'' Both were a brutal, unrelenting slaughter only surpassed in sadistic cruelty by the food served by the university's dining commons. Men and women alike were left empty shells, their bodies sapped of life and strewn about in a haphazard stream of F's, D's and perpetual incompletes. And I chose to do battle with that demon. No, I was not a grad student learned, overconfident with a degree under my belt. No, I was not a senior who was forced to take the class in order to get that trivial piece of paper known as a diploma. I was a junior, brash, outrageous and daring. The list of merciless tyrants -- Hitler, Stalin, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun and my old piano teacher -- seems incomplete without the name of CS 502's creator, Professor Robert Graham. He wrote the text, he designed the curriculum, and, most importantly, he sadistically masterminded the programming assignments. During the Middle Ages, if a man was accused of a crime, he could chose to be tested by fire. He was given a bar of red hot metal, forced to hold it and walk the length of the room. If God chose to protect his flesh from the searing hot metal, he was innocent of the crime. The Puritans of Colonial Massachusetts had a similar test for witches. They'd throw an accused witch into a pond and if she floated, she was a witch and burned at the stake. If she sank and drowned to death, she was proved not to be a witch. Such were Bob Graham's programming assignments. God, or Allah as the case may be, chose to protect me by granting me a programming partner named Eman Hashem. She was Palestinian and what Palestinians typically are to terrorism, Eman was to computer engineering. Her grade point: 4.0 out of 4.0. We're not talking a 4.0 with an art class, ``clay for an A'', or geology for the criminally stupid, ``rocks for jocks.'' We're talking a flawless 4.0 with 3 semesters of calculus, chemistry, physics and a whole slew of courses schools form press gangs in order to fill. There is but one God and his name is Allah. I was truly blessed and two weeks into the course, Eman chose to drop. |