Next week is the last week of my first term in community college.
It is… very troubling how much I’ve already forgotten from the first weeks of some of my classes. To a degree this is probably normal, and is why we have review assignments and study guides. But it doesn’t make me feel good about myself, because every final is going to have content from the entire semester.
In College Algebra, I face a different, but equally frustrating problem: I never really learned how to solve some of the more complex logarithm questions (which we I was supposed to learn relatively recently, so it’s not an issue of I just forgot). I got a 73 on the last test (not the final), which was frustrating as it was something I had deliberately set time to study prepare for (3Blue1Brown videos are great for visualizing concepts, by the way).
I started asking myself why I cared so much about my GPA, after denouncing the concept of grades in high school. And the answer is the same reason I’m going to college at all: because even though I don’t particularly care about it, employers do. And I do think that’s silly; anywhere from a third to a half of your cumulative GPA isn’t really representing any skills you’d need for a job related to your major, since to get a degree you need to take a series of core classes. But complaining about it isn’t going to do me much good.
I guess the point of this post is to state that the initial optimism I had going in to community college has mostly evaporated. I hope as my college career goes on and my classes become more focused and advanced, I enjoy it more.