"i love to learn" or "i'm still bitter about that D I got eight years ago"

Btw, I love to take classes at our local community college and have been blessed to get to take them because my mom foots the bill (thanks again, Mom!) 

I signed up for Econ 201 - Macroeconomics this semester. I was nervous. Maybe I'd gone too far this time I thought to myself while looking over the text for the class. WHY IN THE WORLD WOULD I HAVE THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA?!?!

I've been told I have a rather "different approach to education" by one of my professors who was a mentor during my English pursuits years ago, and I decided to take it as a compliment. My college career has been what I like to call eclectic. Classes I picked because they sounded fun to take, that may or may not have applied to any degree I was perusing, include Finger Spelling, News Writing, Survey of World Mythology, Introduction to Allied Health...

I've enjoyed nearly every one of my classes, with a few exceptions like an Intermediate Aerobics class (back when I was so sleep deprived I thought that yes, I could get up at 5AM after waitressing until 2AM and still be coordinated enough not to knock someone else out in class two days a week). A rather fortuitous bout of bronchitis got me out of that class without too much guilt!

Another class that still really gets me riled up is the only class ever that I received a D in (I'm considering taking a break to throw up and come back, since I'm admitting a D out here... on the INTERNET, but I'm going to post it AND I'm not going to loose my lunch over it, AND it won't result in a 'ghost post'!) Any way, the class was "Computer Operating Systems" which I took the Spring semester just after the big Windows XP release. Given the course title and description in the college catalog, I was under the impression that we'd be learning the highlights and inner workings of some of the major operating systems (OS). Boy, was I ever wrong! It turned out the course was two lectures on the fact that there were OS (primarily focusing on DOS/Windows . . . someone else bringing up the idea of Unix was quickly stopped - that's not what this class is about.) Then we were on to the real agenda of the class: an in depth look into what I now know would be my personal pit of despair, WINDOWS 2000. 

I'm going to give you a brief list of my excuses of why I didn't do well in that particular class:

  • the course title and description were a complete LIE! 
  • Windows 2000 was an outdated OS at that point, and though I can see why it was handy for a college or businesses to use for their huge networks for a long time after that . . . that's NOT what the course description said the class was about!
  • average amount of sleep I was getting per night was 3 hours. Often just stayed up since it wasn't worth risking sleeping through work over 3 hours of sleep. . .  
  • the floppy disk that I turned in the final project on died (as they notoriously do) so all my teacher got was an error when he tried to access the project and he couldn't accept a late redo of the final at that point
  • the love of my life then lived just under 2,000 miles away and so I chose to distract myself with too many commitments. (next time I'll just sleep more, really.)


Realistically, going to college full time along with working 70 - 80 hours a week was one of the more ridiculous things I've done. That's right, along with racking up a bunch of credit card debt at the same time, it's on my top three "young and dumb" things to do. I ended up blaming everything on that ridiculous class, which in my self-caused sleep deprived state, was perfectly logical, and rather than try to make some effort or change classes, I stayed, out of "principle" and got a D.


The dread I feel when someone mentions Windows 2000, or when I have horrifying flash backs to that class, is what struck fear in my heart (or maybe just my stomach) after I started looking over the daunting text I have for Macroeconomics. Vowing not to have a repeat of the notorious OS class, and logistically unable to switch classes, I went to the first class last Monday night. Guess what. This class is going to be cake. It comes down to four tests, none using unreliable floppy diskettes. It helps too, that I now an only slightly sleep deprived full time mom.

Here's my point, which I don't think I really made yet: learning, even when the task itself was an abysmal failure, can be worth it. And while I'm not trying to attribute my D to my mom, or the fact that I was home schooled, I do mean to say, thank you Mom and Dad. I still love to learn, enjoy an academic challenge,  and can't imagine life without all the books and sometimes, learning the hard way.

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for the link-love [smile].

    My wife flunked her jogging class in college because the instructor told the class that he didn't jog, he gardened.

    I agree--now--that learning is more important than grades. However, the school system makes grades/scores the important thing, so while in school I correctly recognized that grades were part of the school game. I like winning, so I did my best to do so. By the time I had a little college experience under my belt, I realized that some classes just weren't worth the effort.

    ~Luke

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  2. Thanks for the empathetic story about your wife's jogging class - it made me smile!

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