First setback

For the most part my time here at CDSP has been a fairly smooth ride.  The trip out was uneventful.  The move in was easy.  After a while I settled in and found my place in the community out here.  The transition from home to the west coast was good.  The one area of transition that I knew might be a bit bumpy was in my academics.  Though I only left Lesley just about a year ago, when I first came out here I was still in that academic mindset.  While other students had not been in school for many years I was only looking at a minor layoff of time that I thought could easily be bridged.  So far it has been alright, but I have now hit my first hurdle and I didn't quite clear it.

Of all my classes I knew that my history course was going to be the most difficult and not because of the content but because of the standard of academic writing involved for the course.  I knew that the professor was a hard grader and it is intentional on his part as he hopes to help shape our writing early in our education here so that we will prepared for the more difficult upper level courses that require this style of writing.  For my first paper, I did well getting an 85 but also received some good comments about what I could have done better.  What I was hoping for was some improvement on my second paper.  Improvement in my grade was not my concern but improvement in my understanding of the text, of making an argument, and improvement in my ability to support and defend that argument.  I got my grade for the second paper and I did not do better, but took a few steps back.  While the grade was 80 and nothing to be looked down upon, but there was one fundamental issue with my second paper.  I misinterpreted the text so that completely undermined my whole paper.  My two friends who edited my paper did not catch it.  The TA for the course did not catch it either, but Dan caught it.  There were a lot of things that needed improvement for the paper but the fact that I wrote it under a false pretense then my whole paper is rubbish, for lack of a better word.

I was bummed.  I am not going to lie.  I knew it wasn't an A paper but I thought that given the time and effort put into I thought that I would show some improvement.  It is a hard pill to swallow, but the true measure of my character is not how I act while I am on top, but how I bounce back when I stumble and fall.  I will be meeting with Dan soon to discuss options for my last paper because I need to make sure that I read the texts correctly in order to produce a good final paper.  It is only one grade, on one paper, in one class that is just one part of my three year education.  Though it is hard to be knocked down, I know that I will stand back up and strive to do a better job the next time around.