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Nov. 2nd, 2009 05:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
commotiocordisSo, my days continue. I do science in my lab, fail at science inexplicably if it's organic chemistry, write poetry in the hour or two I have before poetry class on Thursday to hand in and am apparently not suck at it as I've got one of two As in the class, volunteer (sort of unvolunteery, as it wasn't exactly my choice) at this children's science museum, eat too much, exercise too little, and hate myself to excess.
The "one of two As" thing in poetry is a subject which many, many people are pissed about--the teacher doesn't give numerical grades on anything, and with poetry it's so subjective that it can come down to whether or not she likes your poetry. Before I knew I had one of the As, I was v. pissed as well (naturally, said pissage has decreased in ferocity somewhat, but I still think it's unfair). She apparently also doesn't subscribe to the honors college guideline that's set down when you start teaching an HC class about how you should expect to give more As than usual because it's a smarter batch of kids and you can't grade them on a bellcurve scale because it's an abnormal sample. (I think higher level science classes should be like this as well, and not only for selfish reasons--think about it frankly; 500-level biomolecular science classes compared to psychology or english or history. Not that those aren't hard, but it's a different type of hard that's not so dependent on knowing and understanding *everything* that's come before. Not to mention that as a general. . . idk, average, science seems to attract a smarter bunch, so being graded against that bunch already puts you at a disadvantage.) For serious, if all HC classes were like this, nobody would take them because it's like being punished for choosing to take the already more intense class because you're also being graded harder.
Fortunately, she likes my style of writing. I'll admit, a couple of my poems are pretty damn good. The one that's all Kirk/Spock-y and the Cameron/Thirteen one, to be precise (yea-uh, I wrote two [heavily, heavily veiled] gay poems and turned them in Smalltown, Biblebelt, USA). But the class is bullshit. We've been spitting out a poem a week for ages, and then we inexplicably had like 3 weeks off around midterms, and now it's back to one a week. Specific assignments most of the time too, so it's not like I can just stock a whole bunch up and then turn them in at intervals, so I would have much preferred that we spaced the off weeks out a bit more.
Orgo is consistently assfucking me to an insanely painful degree. It's obviously not entirely to blame, as I tend to do this every year due to the combination of light deprivation in the winter and the fact that school starts to pile the fuck on, but I've gotten majorly, majorly depressed lately and a huge part of it is the fact that I'm pulling a low C in that class. The worst part is that I can't figure out why. I mean, mathmatically the grade works out to a C, that's not what I mean; I feel like I'm getting most of the stuff, and then things come back with bad grades on them. I keep getting 6-8 out of 10 on these open note quizzes (which I maintain can't be my fault, as we're quizzed during the same class period as the stuff was lectured on, usually, and I hit around the average; if the average is that, the guy obviously isn't lecturing well or we'd all understand it better), and then a C on the last lecture test, and a mother fucking F on the lab test that I expected to ace--when I got in there, it was not the stuff that I'd studied (off of the study guide they handed out!) at all, but I still didn't feel that bad about it.
That cut is prolly the first time I've spelled out the whole name, LOL, as I was informed that this doesn't count as my biochem for med school (even though the book is a biochem text and that's pretty much what the class is, what's going to show up on my transcript is "interactions", and that's all they'll see). Rather displeased at that. So I'm going to have to take a biochem class too.
This "not the stuff that I studied" as mentioned above re: orgo was the same situation as in biochem on Friday, which was horrible and I spent most of the hour afterwards trying not to cry (noticing which was my first warning that the depression that I've been fighting the moderate-level peaks and valleys of for the last month or so had dipped into bad), but I still managed an 80% or so in that. The others that I studied with (and one that I didn't) that work in my lab were of similar minds, though, that it wasn't what we thought would be on there, so I'm thinking other grades will probably be similar. I'm hoping this is a pre-curved grade and not a post-curved one and that it will go up, because I studied my ass off for that. (It's become rather a pattern of my not going to bed on the night before tests and assignments, one that I'm not a fan of. Also, apparently, tonight as well, as I've worked myself into being miserable.)
I haven't finished writing up the lab to turn in for orgo, but there's maybe 10 minutes of that to do. What usually has me in a time crunch on Mondays is the biochem labs, as the teacher is a fail at teaching and always has to correct or change or instruct on how to either finish the lab before or write up the lab that will be done during class on Monday. I've pretty much quit doing anything for those labs until after his class on Monday because I end up wasting my time and having to do it again anyway. Maybe he doesn't realize that some of us have class between his class and the later lab section, but we (or, at least I) do, and thus don't really have the time to wait until he tells us what we need to write up as by then, I've only got one guaranteed free hour to finish two labs in.
I do need to stop just taking graded tests at their word. I'm not really checking any of them over at all, even just to see what I missed and make sure I learn it, which is bad. Mostly because I don't want to face these grades again, you know, as school is my entire measure of personal success. Basically, I'm pulling the same self-defeating shit I pulled all through high school except now I'm pulling it where it really matters and I'm not going to be able to sneak by anyway because This Is It.
I'm so fucking terrified that every little thing is going to be the one that stops me from going to medical school. I mean, I've talked about this frankly before--if I don't get in to medical school, I'm probably going to kill myself because I do not know what I'm going to do with my life. I've been saying that forever, but as this possible future appears to be becoming a probability (my MCAT scores on the practice test sucking, now my grades as usual being not good), you'd expect that I'd back off from that a bit, especially as how I've been all "Ooh, I wish I could do this and that and major in this and go work in politics blah blah" lately. Not at all. It's not because I don't know what else I can do with my life (I'd have to switch majors, but I love politics crazy hard, and I could see myself teaching AP biology or chemistry [ha! but I did well in genchem] or even English), but because this is, on Alexandria scale, the ultimate failure. If something that has guided every single decision I have ever made in my life ends up not coming to fruition, what the fuck have I lived the past 19 years for?
Anyway. Either my nap today was more productive than I thought (I was waking up every couple of minutes, though, so I doubt it) or I'm more miserable than I thought, because I just realized that it's the second day of daylight savings time, so my body should think it's almost 6am (though it's 5) and yet I'm not tired. Massive headache that I had most of yesterday and came back a few hours ago is also probably a contributing factor. Blargh.
The "one of two As" thing in poetry is a subject which many, many people are pissed about--the teacher doesn't give numerical grades on anything, and with poetry it's so subjective that it can come down to whether or not she likes your poetry. Before I knew I had one of the As, I was v. pissed as well (naturally, said pissage has decreased in ferocity somewhat, but I still think it's unfair). She apparently also doesn't subscribe to the honors college guideline that's set down when you start teaching an HC class about how you should expect to give more As than usual because it's a smarter batch of kids and you can't grade them on a bellcurve scale because it's an abnormal sample. (I think higher level science classes should be like this as well, and not only for selfish reasons--think about it frankly; 500-level biomolecular science classes compared to psychology or english or history. Not that those aren't hard, but it's a different type of hard that's not so dependent on knowing and understanding *everything* that's come before. Not to mention that as a general. . . idk, average, science seems to attract a smarter bunch, so being graded against that bunch already puts you at a disadvantage.) For serious, if all HC classes were like this, nobody would take them because it's like being punished for choosing to take the already more intense class because you're also being graded harder.
Fortunately, she likes my style of writing. I'll admit, a couple of my poems are pretty damn good. The one that's all Kirk/Spock-y and the Cameron/Thirteen one, to be precise (yea-uh, I wrote two [heavily, heavily veiled] gay poems and turned them in Smalltown, Biblebelt, USA). But the class is bullshit. We've been spitting out a poem a week for ages, and then we inexplicably had like 3 weeks off around midterms, and now it's back to one a week. Specific assignments most of the time too, so it's not like I can just stock a whole bunch up and then turn them in at intervals, so I would have much preferred that we spaced the off weeks out a bit more.
Orgo is consistently assfucking me to an insanely painful degree. It's obviously not entirely to blame, as I tend to do this every year due to the combination of light deprivation in the winter and the fact that school starts to pile the fuck on, but I've gotten majorly, majorly depressed lately and a huge part of it is the fact that I'm pulling a low C in that class. The worst part is that I can't figure out why. I mean, mathmatically the grade works out to a C, that's not what I mean; I feel like I'm getting most of the stuff, and then things come back with bad grades on them. I keep getting 6-8 out of 10 on these open note quizzes (which I maintain can't be my fault, as we're quizzed during the same class period as the stuff was lectured on, usually, and I hit around the average; if the average is that, the guy obviously isn't lecturing well or we'd all understand it better), and then a C on the last lecture test, and a mother fucking F on the lab test that I expected to ace--when I got in there, it was not the stuff that I'd studied (off of the study guide they handed out!) at all, but I still didn't feel that bad about it.
That cut is prolly the first time I've spelled out the whole name, LOL, as I was informed that this doesn't count as my biochem for med school (even though the book is a biochem text and that's pretty much what the class is, what's going to show up on my transcript is "interactions", and that's all they'll see). Rather displeased at that. So I'm going to have to take a biochem class too.
This "not the stuff that I studied" as mentioned above re: orgo was the same situation as in biochem on Friday, which was horrible and I spent most of the hour afterwards trying not to cry (noticing which was my first warning that the depression that I've been fighting the moderate-level peaks and valleys of for the last month or so had dipped into bad), but I still managed an 80% or so in that. The others that I studied with (and one that I didn't) that work in my lab were of similar minds, though, that it wasn't what we thought would be on there, so I'm thinking other grades will probably be similar. I'm hoping this is a pre-curved grade and not a post-curved one and that it will go up, because I studied my ass off for that. (It's become rather a pattern of my not going to bed on the night before tests and assignments, one that I'm not a fan of. Also, apparently, tonight as well, as I've worked myself into being miserable.)
I haven't finished writing up the lab to turn in for orgo, but there's maybe 10 minutes of that to do. What usually has me in a time crunch on Mondays is the biochem labs, as the teacher is a fail at teaching and always has to correct or change or instruct on how to either finish the lab before or write up the lab that will be done during class on Monday. I've pretty much quit doing anything for those labs until after his class on Monday because I end up wasting my time and having to do it again anyway. Maybe he doesn't realize that some of us have class between his class and the later lab section, but we (or, at least I) do, and thus don't really have the time to wait until he tells us what we need to write up as by then, I've only got one guaranteed free hour to finish two labs in.
I do need to stop just taking graded tests at their word. I'm not really checking any of them over at all, even just to see what I missed and make sure I learn it, which is bad. Mostly because I don't want to face these grades again, you know, as school is my entire measure of personal success. Basically, I'm pulling the same self-defeating shit I pulled all through high school except now I'm pulling it where it really matters and I'm not going to be able to sneak by anyway because This Is It.
I'm so fucking terrified that every little thing is going to be the one that stops me from going to medical school. I mean, I've talked about this frankly before--if I don't get in to medical school, I'm probably going to kill myself because I do not know what I'm going to do with my life. I've been saying that forever, but as this possible future appears to be becoming a probability (my MCAT scores on the practice test sucking, now my grades as usual being not good), you'd expect that I'd back off from that a bit, especially as how I've been all "Ooh, I wish I could do this and that and major in this and go work in politics blah blah" lately. Not at all. It's not because I don't know what else I can do with my life (I'd have to switch majors, but I love politics crazy hard, and I could see myself teaching AP biology or chemistry [ha! but I did well in genchem] or even English), but because this is, on Alexandria scale, the ultimate failure. If something that has guided every single decision I have ever made in my life ends up not coming to fruition, what the fuck have I lived the past 19 years for?
Anyway. Either my nap today was more productive than I thought (I was waking up every couple of minutes, though, so I doubt it) or I'm more miserable than I thought, because I just realized that it's the second day of daylight savings time, so my body should think it's almost 6am (though it's 5) and yet I'm not tired. Massive headache that I had most of yesterday and came back a few hours ago is also probably a contributing factor. Blargh.
