It has been a month. A busy one. I think I last wrote when I had signed up for the Boogie 50 ultramarathon. That was before my Bio-statistics course got going full swing.
Over the past few weeks I was unable to complete many of my distance runs and am toying with the idea of dropping the 50 mile ultra. The race does have a marathon option but I'm not quite sure I'd be ready for that either (although I have like 5 weeks and definitely could fit in a 15, 18 and 20 miler if I started now).
Where does that bring me? To who the heck knows where. That's where.
It's been a rough couple of weeks. I am finally done with my bio-statistics course but feel slightly mentally damaged from it.
Something I've also been mind-wrestling with over the past few weeks is how to get my homework, professional work, my book (gasp yes I am about done with it) and my running all in. Some times it seems impossible.
Hopefully I will get the hang of everything. My plan (of course we all know what happens when I plan things out right?) is to get up in the morning and do my reading for my school work daily. Monday, Wednesday and Friday are going to be school work priority nights. Tuesday and Thursdays are going to be Book Work nights. Saturday and Sunday are hopefully going to contain a mixture of school work, working out and writing. Whew. Got it? I don't.
Something came up this week a few days ago that really took me out mentally and I wanted to bring it up here.
As I mentioned before, my bio-statistics course is finally coming to an end. We had our last exam. It was a surprise (there was absolutely no indication of it in the syllabus) cumulative final exam that contained many questions not within our reading assignments.
I began the quiz (as it was called) thinking it was similar to every other quiz we had been given over the course only to see a much longer and heavier worded list of questions on my computer screen. Most of the questions were worded differently than any homework assignment we had been given and two of the questions (that I still don't understand) repeated themselves. Also, each question was worth two points. So if you missed one, you missed two.
After almost four hours of racking my brain and insulting myself for being "stupid, dumb, and terrible" I finished the exam. I failed. I just stared at it. The lowest grade I had thus far received in the course was a 98% and there before my eyes was a big fat 47%! I was so confused. Why hadn't I understood it? How could I be so stupid that I didn't understand it? What was wrong with me?
I immediately emailed the teacher to see if this was indeed our exam, then posted to our course student chat room to see if any one else had taken the quiz. But no one got back to me (of course I hadn't considered the possibility that everyone else thought it would be just like the other quiz's and hadn't even attempted it yet because I was too busy berating myself for failing).
Until that night someone did get back to me. Then again Saturday and Sunday. Replies came in one by one as students opened the quiz and were met with whatever that thing called a "quiz" was.
Now, looking back I think, how could I have based the way I felt about myself on a stupid test. Just because I failed a test does not mean I am a bad person, it means nothing about me other than at that moment in time, I did not pass what a teacher said I should. That's it.
So I'm choosing to learn from this experience. I will always ask my instructor about a final exam. I will not jump off the handle when I fail an exam out of the blue like that because odds are I'm not alone. Most importantly, I will not define my self worth by what a test says I can do.
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