When one (or four) boards a boat, one (or four) usually knows what they’re doing. I’m not really a boating man, and I don’t know much about being out at sea (basic survival skills apply, but uncharted waters will be uncharted waters). But still I find myself tripping at the big dock of life and falling into an unfamiliar boat called “college.”

I enrolled in a ten week summer class called “Software Design,” taught by one Mr. Mendonsa. Although it’s called software design, its purpose isn’t how to tell me how to create the next overpriced product on the market; and instead offers an overview of computer science so that we understand what goes on in the secret lives of computers while we are designing our software. This includes several fundamentals, like binary, hexadecimal, data storage, et cetera. (For the record, we start programming in C near the 6th week.)

This is all very new to me: I’ve never really been exposed to a classroom setting, and certainly not one where I have to worry about a grade, so I didn’t know what to expect.

My mom, brother, and I left our house at around 5:15 PM. After dropping my brother off at Synagogue, we trudged through insanely slow-moving traffic from Norfolk to Chesapeake… a treck that ideally would have taken about twenty minutes. Still, we arrived at around 6:30 and I hurried awkwardly to classroom 2038. Standing in front of the room was none other than my teacher (I didn’t know it at the time), who directed me instead to room 2010. Luckily I knew where it was because I went the wrong way upon building entry.

I brought along my new Kingston DataTraveler 4GB flash drive (on sale now, buy buy buy) just in case we were in a room with computers. I’m not good at writing by hand, so that I thought I might be able to take notes that way. Unfortunately we were in a small room with rows of chairs squashed together in a stick-your-gum-under-the-desk-and-pass-notes sort of way.

It’s a small class of seven people, but of the Enrolled Few, only four showed up. I sat as far back as I could. There was a brief discussion on intelligence where we were asked to give our opinion of what it is. Knowing this was going to turn into a “computer intelligence” shpiel, the best answer I could come up with was “the ability to learn.” For the moment I felt proud of my answer, until we had to expound upon why we said what we said… that’s where I start tripping over my words.

Incredibly and much to my disbelief I survived the fiasco (but not before saying that computers had to be “encouraged”). The rest of the lecture was focused on binary. Logical operations with binary, math with binary, shorthand binary, how binary relates to storage units, binary representing text… binary. Binary for three hours. Have you ever listened to someone talk about binary for that long? It does a number on your brain (or two numbers—I’m sure you can guess). It’s more interesting than it sounds, it’s just that I had to clean up the brains that leaked out of my ears when we were finished. Much of it I already knew, but Mr. Mendonsa was able to connect the pieces that were fragmented for me, so apart from trying to be an answer hog I was able to do some learning.

Class finally ended (late) and I was able to go home. It was nearly 10.