xv. growth [1]

— Hello everyone!

    I hope you’re all having a lovely time, wherever you are.

    I won’t hold you up now. This post will be looooooong, so let us get right to the #growthchallenge.

The past school year has been quite eye opening, as horrible as it was. To understand my story a little bit better, let me give you some context.

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↦ This year’s grades were important for my future in education. I’ve been told to keep my general average above 90 and have at least a 5 point gap between my grade and the class average for every subject to be accepted into the college of my choice.

↦ For my desired career, I needed to take advanced mathematics, as opposed to the regular mathematics we had up to that point. The workload for maths more than doubled.

↦ At the end of this particular year, we had a huge exam that could count for a   minimum of 50% of your grade.

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   We had been warned that math was not going to be easy [we had to choose between advanced maths and regular maths the year before]. I was nervous going into the class for the first day, not knowing how much work to really expect. Thankfully, I adapted well enough in the first semester to with a lovely 90-something in my report card.

    Was that it? That wasn’t too bad! I could manage this just fine, working as much as I did, which quite frankly, wasn’t a lot. Sure, I did my homework. I revised the night before for tests. But I never did more than what was asked of me.

    Then came the second semester and everything decided to take a dive. That was when the teacher started demanding what was actually required of us and stopped letting us off the hook as easily. I did good in tests, great, even, but when it came to exams, I would always mess up. A grade above 80 was pure bliss.

    By the end of it, I had a 77. The class average was now 76, as opposed to the 80-something of the first semester and I was hovering right over it. That was a huge drop. Meanwhile, my friends talked about their 96s and oh, how close and painful that 99 felt.

    Surely, I was just dumb? Surely, I would never achieve anything in my life? I was useless, pathetic, so I could just kiss my dreams of going into medicine goodbye?

Wrong.

   My only problem, really, was that I was too lazy and perhaps a tad bit too arrogant. My friends would work their bottoms off before a test. I just didn’t think I needed to do that. In fact, I wasn’t willing to do that. I was sure I could beat them by pure intelligence. And I ended up paying the price for thinking like that.

   So I got a tutor for math and I started doing what my friends did. I started working hard and for the days leading up to my final exam in maths, I kept doing more and more exercises, again and again. I asked for help from my friends, as embarrassed as that would make me, because I was desperate. This was the exam that could make it or break it.

    Guess what? It paid off... Well, somewhat. I got an alright grade. I still got put into a class that would get me extra help next year [there are less people in that class]. But at least I pulled myself out of that ditch. And I was so proud of myself, because I had worked so hard for that grade, to the point of making myself sick of maths. I was happy though. Even if I wasn’t the best.

I still can’t beat my friends at hardwork. I’m not used to it and I suppose I do burn out fairly quickly compared to them. However, that won’t stop me from trying and I can’t wait to redeem myself this year.

   In the end, it was a struggle, but isn’t that how we grow the most?

x. o.