Annnnnnnnnnnd I totally failed the oral presentation.

[here_inmyhead]

Eventually I'll have to reopen my Rhetoric folder to find yet another glaring D- (F even, it's likely)  followed by the usual commentary.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm here in college for the independence, living experience, creative writing, obscure movies, giant libraries and funky locations rather than doing miserably on prioritizing and handling assignments for classes. I'm having trouble concentrating on even my favorite. I only seem to be doing good at Choir and even I get worried about accidently missing rehearsals.

Comments

[zerenitia.livejournal.com]

Oh sweetie...

You know some of the best minds never could quite 'fit-in' in college, yeah? Sometimes I wonder if you're just one of those people :)

[insanepurin.livejournal.com]

I just thought if I got to college and took classes, I would discover a ton of different things I wouldn't otherwise find than if I just went on with my life in an apartment after high school, you know? Considering I was kind of sheltered the last two years of high school, I had NO IDEA that I would have to turn in 5-7 page essays (7-10 at most from last year) when the most I've ever written was what? 3-4 pages? I was taught to summarize articles, and was nothing but drilled on that. Summarize summarize summarize. Teachers are obsessed with that. So for one assignment when I was told to analyze a paper and to limit our summarizing, it went over my head. In high school, summarizing IS analyzing, and that there wasn't a significant difference between the two. lulz

I can't tell if I'm just overwhelmed, feel lied to throughout high school and betrayed they never prepared me this, or if I'm just... gah. *throws hands up*

[insanepurin.livejournal.com]

Except here's the problem. I'm an A student at high school (Bs in Math usually), so whenever I see people complain over a fucking B like it's a horrible thing, I want to slap them. Especially since now I'm getting Ds and Fs.

[zerenitia.livejournal.com]

Mmmmm. Ah yes, one of those cases, where the student of much potential has not a clue what to do when they get to college.

I admit, when I was in highschool we only ever wrote at best 3-6 pages for papers, and I had only one teacher who made us do a research paper for a law class. However, I was fortunate enough in my first year of university to have my first English prof use the class as a "boot camp". In there, she assumed we already knew basic mechanics and the like (and she'd freak if we didn't know how to spell something), but taught us things like how to read a story and then find something called a 'core motif', some kind of element or object in the story/poem/whatever that we could elaborate on and argue that the entire article we read relied on that ONE thing.

And on top of that, she eventually had us coming into the class (which was only an hour and fifteen minutes), read a poem, and then we were to find the motif, write a 3-6 page paper about it and argue why it is the very thing that makes the poem what it is, proofread it to perfection and hand it in. In fact, that was our midterm.

Our FINAL, which was three hours long, she had had us read ahead three stories, and when we walked into our final exam she had written up on the board which two of the three stories she wanted us to write on. Which meant we had roughly an hour and a half for both stories to plan, write, and proofread two whole essays to hand in to her.


:D She even taught us cover letters and stuff to get jobs. It was a TON of work, but I swear she taught us SO much just by working us into the ground like that--I seriously wish we had more teachers like her =/

[insanepurin.livejournal.com]

Yes... see, there's no way I don't think I could've handled all that. Boot camp, sure. Maybe. But basically they plucked me out of a soccer mom mansion and into the middle of nuclear war, and expected to know how to handle a grenade when I never held one in my life.

[zerenitia.livejournal.com]

T__T Oh honey, it worries me so much to hear you talk bad about yourself in your entires, though. And I know it's probably getting tiring to hear me say it all the time, but you gotta keep going at it--sometimes, it really speaks to some people to see someone else crash and burn and still get right back up and try again and again. If I were there I'd try to help you study and understand stuff and all that jazz--my friends used to steal my study sheets from me (the ones I made up for MYSELF for exams >>) and copied other odd habits of mine for completing assignments and the like, like checklists and interrogating the teacher for what exactly they wanted in their assignments and the like.

But I digress D: You know you have many fans cheering for you, honey. Work hard, be proud of your work even if the teachers/profs aren't, and don't stress or you'll make yourself sick for the holidays!

[deryck.livejournal.com]

I was also in this situation, maybe even more extreme than yours if you know how bad NYC public high schools are. In college, I basically had to re-learn how to write. High school writing only focuses on getting students to pass; college writing focuses on students already being at their best--but some of us who enter college never got the right basics to begin with!