Sweet Relief
So my ‘daily’ intentions have not worked out so well, but I’ve got a good excuse. I’ve gone back to school to complete my Bachelor’s in English. To kick off my return to college, I chose to take British Literature I as my first English class. This was an especially difficult class - it was a time-condensed course (5 weeks at 2 hours a day, 5 days a week) with the normal amount of reading that goes with a literature survey. Compounding the difficulty, I work full time and could only attend 2 out of the 5 days per week. I made a deal with the professor where I would make up for the class quizzes and discussion that I would miss by writing an essay on whatever the class topic was on the days I was absent.
Needless to say I had zero room for error. Of course, as luck would I have it, I got a nasty cold and fever the last few days of the last week, and my ability to keep up with the work for this class fell apart. During the last weekend before the final I was cramming literature into my eyeballs. By the night before the final, I still had 100 pages to read and two essays to write. It was a long night.
The day of the final was a comedy of errors (Shakespeare pun intended). The final was fairly difficult, and it seemed that in the limited time that I was left to prepare for the test I had focused on all the wrong things. My mind was blank, and every question looked like an impossibility. So, I did the only thing I could do; start writing.
Thankfully, as I started writing bits of information started to come forward. I felt confident in about 40% of the answers I gave. I tried embellishing answers that I was reasonably sure of to try to offset the lightweight answers I had given to the the questions I was less sure about. I took the entire 2 hours to complete the test, and left the College of Arts and Letters building feeling terrible, dragging my feet to my next final exam (Film Business and Marketing - which was much, much easier).
The torture started as I left my Film Business final. I began to remember the answers to questions that had earlier left my mind blank. Even worse, I started recalling answers I had given that were obviously wrong. Worst of all, I remembered some of those answers I had embellished, and realized that some of my embellishments had turned correct answers into incorrect ramblings! I was devastated, thinking of how it would look to fail a course that was in my major. It was at that time that life imitated art; the sky suddenly and with great force dumped gallons of rain on me, and I still had half a mile to walk to my truck. I drove home soaked, sad, and angry, trying to think of anything that I could do to influence leniency from the professor.
I decided to prove that I did learn at least one thing, despite what my test would surely show. I wrote a sonnet, in Shakespearean form, subtly pleading my case and asking for mercy. You can read it here. I’m not sure if it worked, but all worked out great in the end. I did better than I had thought on the exam, earning a not-so-great-but-passing grade of 77. Averaged with my mid-term (which I did much better on) and my quiz grades (the essays), I ended up with a borderline A! This is the definition of sweet relief.
July 11th, 2007 at 6:06 am
Ha, that sounds like my entire first year of college actually.
Glad you got through though, and hopefully things have settled down a bit.
July 12th, 2007 at 11:13 am
hopefully!