As the fourth week of classes begins, most of us are finally realizing how much we had forgotten over the summer. But if you guys are anything like me, you haven’t managed to actually relearn much of it, let alone absorb new material.
Currently, my brain is functioning like a cylinder full of water after you pull its bottom face out. Sure I can keep pumping new knowledge in there, but it’s only replacing all that’s been lost out of the bottom. And I have a good feeling that most of the time I’m only refilling it at about half the rate it’s draining.
Nevertheless, it’s about that time to have those levels measured — here comes the first round of tests!
All that time we’ve spent running around campus, developing carpal tunnel syndrome taking notes and employing agent-like stealth to keep those awful chairs from squeaking. None of that matters. It all comes down to those 50 (or 80, for Tuesday-Thursday classes) minutes.
It’s easy to remain delusional through regular school operations — “Oh, I don’t need to work on those example problems,” you think. “I understood everything perfectly when the professor explained it. I am totally competent and in no way absolutely screwed. Two weeks is a long time from now!”
And then you arise from the two-week haze, not sure where you are. You’re dripping sweat by the gallon onto a stack of papers. The text is written in a foreign language, and this isn’t a foreign language class.
You look around to check if you’re in the right room. That snarky know-it-all who’s a year below you but in all your classes shoots you a thumbs up and a condescending smile. Yep, it’s all over.
You look up at the clock. There is no clock. You look down at your watch. You remember you stopped it at a certain time as an inside joke with your best friend who happened to fail out of your major a year ago. Could have really used you right now, buddy.
“10 minutes left!”
Well, you’ve managed to rewrite the one equation the professor put on the board at the beginning of the exam. You stare at it for nine more minutes as if by some voodoo magic it’s going to rearrange itself into an answer. Then you turn the test in a minute early to make everyone think you knew what you were doing. You trip down the stairs and wake up in the hospital.
Most of us know this scenario all too well. Semester after semester, we vow to keep ourselves out of it. And semester after semester, we fail to do so.
But there’s still hope, and this is where I think it lies — we, as students, need to come to terms with the fact that almost all of us are total morons.
We like to walk around as if we’ve already mastered our subjects of study. We like to pretend to be better than everyone around us.
In reality, we don’t know anything.
It is only once we admit how pathetic we are that we can start to work on fixing it. Maybe you didn’t understand that homework as well as you assured your friends you did. Maybe it wasn’t a fluke that you failed that last quiz. Maybe you never really did understand anything from the prerequisite for your hardest course. I don’t think I need to quote Alcoholics Anonymous to tell you what the first step is.
Make the leap of humbling yourself, try your best to catch up and then maybe when the tests come back you won’t have to sneak out the room before anyone asks you how you did.
Ryan Monk is a 21-year-old chemical engineering senior from Lake Charles, Louisiana. You can reach him on Twitter @RyanMonkTDR.