Chapter Nineteen: An Average Student (~jinghan)
If there such a thing as writer’s block, there is such a thing as bloggers block – it even alliterates. I have about three “Chapter Something”s backlogged in my drafts folder because nothing during swotvac* has been inspiring enough to write about. And it has come to a point where the lack of inspiration itself has become a cause for writing.
I have found myself saying over and over to friends, “I feel let down by uni, I thought I would never have to study intensively again after VCE**! What a fool!” I say it in a light comical tone, but perhaps I mean it a little more than I care to admit.
“But I love exams!” a uni friend had typed to me upon my whinging about never studying so intensively again. I knew what I was supposed to say, “you’re crazy!” But what I felt was a little twinge of recognition. VCE had seemed to mean so much at the time, and I faintly recall that I enjoyed the study routine that I had developed by the end of the year. I would trot to the library, whip up an essay, power through some maths problems and feel very satisfied with myself afterwards. At one point I was writing three essays, in three hours, every second day – when it would have taken me five hours to write half an essay only a year ago.
It was almost studying for the sake of vanity. For the good feeling you get when you get the final result and it is good. Nothing wrong with that I suppose…
But it was unsustainable. The only thing that kept me going was the thought that I would only have to put myself through this until the end of the year. So when swotvac for uni finally dawned upon me, it was like the world had betrayed me. I had worked my but off to get a good score, to get into uni, shouldn’t I be reaping the rewards now? More study? Was that it? Monday, day one of study “vacation” boot-camp, I could hardly bring myself to get out of bed, knowing what was ahead.
Slowly, uncheerfully, I coaxed myself back into some sort of a study routine.
I’m not sure if I set out to regain the same vigour and successful-feeling that I had back in VCE, but it didn’t happen that way. And after some thought, it’s maybe a good thing that I didn’t go to uni to only just go back to that same isolating and vane studying.
Instead I found myself puzzling over single questions for almost an hour. There were no worked solutions, and even if there was an answer given to us, it was not necessarily correct (I discovered). I found ideas that I hadn’t understood back when it was taught in the lecture (or was it taught at all?) I know this sounds terribly arrogant, but studying had never been so hard for me. I had built up a good study routine, but never a good support system for when I got stuck.
“*comes whimpering to you for help*” was what I typed into the subject header for the facebook message. I added a friend from my physics class into the “To:” box, but ended up adding two more people by the time I had listed all the questions I had been having problems with. What I was hoping would be a quick response to a few finite problems became a discussion forum. I wasn’t used to studying non-solo, but this was good. I was understanding things that I could never have dissected alone. And likewise questions were thrown back at me, and I was forced to think ideas through properly before framing a response that wouldn’t confuse my classmates.
I guess I hadn’t really taken it seriously when they told us that “if you were a good student back at school you might find yourself being a rather average student at uni.” I mean I acknowledged it, nodded and smiled, even spoke the words myself. But it didn’t really hit home until the night before my exam as it sat there waiting for the facebook message to be updated, thinking “god, this is the least confident I’ve ever felt before an exam.”
But that said, this has also been the set of exams that I’ve been the least stressed about. Perhaps the feeling of not being confident is actually the feeling of not being stressed to the point of frenzied studying.
My VCE-minded former self would have been in a huff about how little ‘studying’ I had done before I walked into the exam room. (In VCE it seemed I had done half a million practice papers before I was allowed to walk into the exam. At uni I had reviewed the topics, learnt some things for the first time and done about three past exams, two and a half really.) But I didn’t feel all that bad walking out of the exam hall.
Odd that.
So maybe I haven’t been swindled into another three years of mind-less competitive studying. I don’t like struggling with study, but maybe it’s good for me. Maybe the swotvac’s ahead will be more about learning than fighting for attention in this world full of so many people. I hope so.