I took a Developmental psychology exam today that went fairly well, but unlike previous semesters, this final felt…well, final. I have a few more to take later in the week, but today really marks the first of a series of lasts. Not only was it the last day of classes, the last day of April, it was the last time I would ever walk out of that lecture hall with a sharpened #2 pencil in hand, irked that I got 5 A’s in a row (Scantrons drive me crazy because my mind naturally seeks out symmetry. Professors torture me when they don’t balance out the # of A’s, B’s, C’s and D’s. It’s even worse when they repeat a letter more than 4 times consecutively. This is the OCD in me coming out).

In order to prepare, I spent the night reading, outlining, and reviewing material related to the following: learning, socialization, child rearing, and gender development.

Did you know that…

5th graders in the US who score in the 90th percentile on reading achievement tests read 200 times as much as those in the 10th percentile.

If your family income is more than $75,000, you’re less likely to report feelings of closeness with your mother compared to those with a family income of $15,000 or less.

Spermache is the clinical term used to describe a male’s capacity to ejaculate.

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) affects 4-12% of children, and boys are four times more likely to be diagnosed than girls.

Prenatal, paternal, and parental use the same letters, just in different order.

Congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) describes a condition in females where adrenal glands overproduce androgens (male hormones), thus accounting for streotypical “tom-boy” behavior.

These are just random pieces of information I pulled out and it only accounts for maybe .3% of the material I covered. Out of all the little trivia facts I now have stored in my head, facts that I’ll probably never have to recall again, this one really jumped out at me:

Children spend roughly 15,000 hours in school from the 1st through the 12th grade.

That folks is A LOT of school right there and it doesn’t even include pre-school and kindergarten, COLLEGE, and umm, this crazy thing called homework. For some reason, just thinking about this blew my mind. It made me realize just how much of my life has been dedicated to school and how looking ahead, that just won’t be the case anymore.

Now I could lie and say I’m devastated about this, but I’m really not. I’m looking forward to having weekends, the opportunity to read the Sunday Times in its entirety, movie nights where I can rent 3 DVDs and watch them all, nights where I can sleep for 8 hours, and trips to bookstores where I’m not picking up something listed on a syllabus. I’m looking forward to putting the scantrons and syllabi behind me along with lectures, looseleaf, and lists.

In terms of school, this week marks the beginining of the end, but in the greater sense, it really is just the beginning.