Reading Week

…was awesome!  Not academic wise, i got nothing done.  But I did volunteer at an elementary school in the east-side of Vancouver, and it was great.  It wasn’t what I had anticipated I didn’t know the volunteers would be in the class the whole day for 3 days, pretty much following a lesson plan created by our group leader.  And a lot of times we would have extra time, and it was fun to kind of think on the spot, and think of a game or activity for the students.  I taught grade 4/5 students, the experience was so great, the kids were so awesome.  Kids are really smart!  I wish I had their memory, these kids memorized things from day 1 that we taught that I couldn’t remember.  I will be going to volunteer hopefully once school is over, it’d be fun to go back.

Now because I had to be up early every day, I couldn’t stay up late.  This was a problem for me, because I study better at night, its weird but when I studied for all my midterms I was studying hardest like 2am to 7am and then i’d sleep and wake up 2-3 hours before my midterm(they were all evening midterms), Bio 201 was 7-9 and this worked really well for me because this has been my best “midterm season” since I got to this school.  I think the key difference is that I got 6 hours before every midterm too.  Now, the only midterm grade I didn’t have after reading week was Biol 201, or Biochem.  And it showed up on vista, and I was so scared, because its a whopping 35%, a huge chunk of my grade.  I felt like I did well on the midterm but its usually safe to deduct 10 to 15% from what you ‘think’ you got.  And when I saw my grade my first thought was like “what happened!” Because it was really low.  Like were the ta’s grading crazy, did I screw up somewhere, what happened!  This was the first midterm grade that was bad, and below average (I later found out the average was 72).  So this depressed me so much, like how come I’m below the majority after studying 3 days straight.  I didn’t study much for like 4 days after this, I guess I went into a bad funk if that makes sense.  You know how it is!  Those days you try to study and its just not working out and you just sleep and fall more and more behind…-_-  Well anyways I signed up to view my midterm to see ‘just where it all went wrong’  And I looked through it.  Biol 201 TAs are real cruel about a few things…if you went to see your midterm please tell me you agree!  Like I’ll have the right idea completely, know exactly what I’m talking about, for a few questions the answer key and my answer were almost verbatum… and then i’d add the word “better”  as in… “creating a stronger nucleophile would lead to a better attack..yada” instantly because of the word ‘better’ -1.  Apparently its redundant and makes it seem like I don’t understand what nucleophiles do *sighhhhhh*  And because i repeated myself in different words another -1.  But nothing I said was incorrect, a few redundant statements maybe, but I’ve never been a great writer!  I BSed my way through English 110.  So it annoys me that I lost most of my marks on trivial things like that.  I guess I know now how things are, so when the final comes around, I know to really pay attention to how I am writing, and to keep it simple.  BUT THATS NOT EVEN THE CRAZY PART.  So I accepted the grading, and decided to just add up the marks before I left, I did and my heart literally dropped.  Because the number on my calculator was 10% higher.  I re-calculated, same thing.  Then I gave it to my prof to make sure I wasn’t crazy, and he got the same number I did, and there you go, now my grade makes more sense!  I’m ok with it, I still want to improve for the final, but WHAT A RELIEF.  This was 35% , and a 10% increase goes a long way.  THANK GOD I added it up, before I left sheesh.  This just goes to show how important it is to look at your midterm over, TAs aren’t computers and don’t think for any reason your midterm won’t be the one they screw up on.

Binta

About binta

UBC First year student. :)

View all posts by binta →