February Challenge Day 16: A Hard Lesson

This is a post I’ve been thinking about for a long time. After not being sure if I would actually write about, I figured it fit well with the prompt, so here you go: a hard lesson.

Last semester I took a principles of macroeconomics class which, you might have heard me say before, was really hard.

The first day of class I was completely lost. I had never studied economics before, so it was a completely foreign thing that my professor just jumped into gung ho. The book is hard enough to read, class lectures were a whole other story, but when you got to the tests it was different than both. I won’t go into a lot of details, but the teaching style really clashed with my learning style, and I was not helped to succeed in this class when I sought help.

When I got the first test back, I almost couldn’t believe it. It was the worst grade I’ve gotten to this day in college. At the same time I got my first accounting test back which hadn’t gone as well as I thought it would. *sigh*

I met with my teacher and was reassured in knowing he grades on improvement and I just needed to work hard to improve and it would be okay. The second test went MUCH better and whew! That was a relief. The third one wasn’t as good, though. It was getting harder. I started meeting with my teacher every single day before class to go over the reading and address any questions I had. I worked my tail off. The last test before the final went better. And then came the Wall Street Journal project where we had to asses the economy through research and tell where it’s going. I worked really hard with my partner on that and we got full credit. Then came the final.

I studied for that thing hard. I was SO done with this class and just wanted to put it behind me.

But it turns out that I didn’t do well enough overall.

So I have to re-take the class.

At some point last semester I had a mini crisis moment where I completely rethought my life and asked myself if this is really what I want to be doing. This is so hard, after all. And I was so done with classes that were on subjects I’m not specifically going to be working in. I prayed and cried about it, because it was just so frustrating. Even when I tried really hard (which lets face it wasn’t 100% of the time), there are some subjects I am simply not good at.

It felt like I was a failure.

But I know that I am not a failure. I just wasn’t made to be an economist. The things I was made to do? I’m really good at those things. I realized that it’s not the end of the world if I’m not a straight A student. As long as I work hard to learn and do my best, the grade I end up with is what it is. Part of my struggle with this class is that I do not feel that my grade was justified, and I still think the class was insane to be taught as a “principles”  class which is supposed to be very basic.

Right now I’m in the principles of microeconomics class with a different teacher and it’s better. But it’s still really hard. As far as I know my macro teacher is the only one to offer it here, so I’m looking into taking it over the summer close to home.

This class will always have a bad little place in my memory, but it made me trust in God’s plan for me a little more. Sure, I have to take this class and get a better grade. But God is bigger than grades. It’s going to work out okay.

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