The summer before my junior year in high school, I decided to enroll in a four-week program at the University of Pennsylvania. I would be taking Calculus and Micro Economics with other kids in my program as well as a few undergraduates at UPenn. At that time the university had been my dream school. I had it in mind that I in two years I would attend Wharton as a business and marketing major.
I was so nervous the day I arrived. I intended to meet various professors at this dream school and get A’s all my classes. But I think I ended up idolizing this one school so much that is only lead me to choke in my classes and ultimately fail.
To start off, I felt pretty confident to start Calculus. I wasn’t too bad in my high school math classes, so I figured how bad could it be. To my shock, my teacher had a heavy Russian accent and she would rush through her sentences. Before I could get half of what she wrote on the chalk board, everything would be erased.
So every day I would go back to my dorm and I think, “Okay, I will just try hard to understand my textbook then, may be that will help me understand what I am doing better.” But, no such luck. The textbook turned out to be just a bunch of questions and no explanations. The only way I could understand what I was looking at was to go through my half written notes and Kahn Academy.
I didn’t understand why I just couldn’t grasp all this information in my classes. All the other kids in my program would be having fun learning and then taking their breaks while I felt miserable and would never be caught without my books. One day our program even took us to Hershey park for a weekend and instead of going on the rides like everyone else, I found a bench to sit on while I tried my hardest to read while wind blew around my pages because I still didn’t come close to understanding what I was supposed to be learning in class.
But, I didn’t want to give up yet. I scheduled and attended office hours with my teacher in which she would show me and answer to a problem then crumple up the answers and tell me I couldn’t have them because I need to learn this on my own.
I was coming quite close to failing, and all the time I spent trying to understand Calculus, I missed out on the time to speak to the professors like I had intended earlier and didn’t get to completely study for my economics course.
In the end, I dropped the course with a Pass/Fail grade and had a C in my economics class. But, my failure didn’t end there. I was so ashamed of what I had done and thought I was so stupid for not understanding what I had done wrong. So like the scuba diver in “The Art of Failing” by Malcolm Gladwell, I tried grasping for ways out of my situation, which only made me sink harder.
I began looking for ways to hide my grades from my parents and when I was alone I would panic and scream with my head spinning from the pressure. I didn’t know how long I could keep my grades a secret. Then one day my parents found out I had been lying about my grades, which got me into more trouble. Not because I did so badly in school, but because I hid my grades for so long.
In comparison to the stories from “The Art of Failure”, I think the first part of this story my failure definitely resulted in me choking on tests. It’s not that I was bad at math, but may be because I went into this school with all these built up expectations, which lead to me constantly messing up my exams. Then the lying came from me panicking about when to do, and I grabbed for a solution without really thinking about what I was doing. I ended up causing more trouble this way and couldn’t recover before it was too late.
In relation to reading “Managing Oneself” by Peter Drucker, he tells us to ask ourselves what are my strengths, how do I perform, what are my values, where do I belong, and how should I contribute? At that time, I know a lot of my performance had dropped because I had so much doubt in myself. I went in expecting to do well, but at the same time as each day rolled by I started to doubt my abilities to understand concepts more and more. I felt out of place in the class like everyone was smarter than me and that it even mattered if they were. Always being truthful with your family is one of the core values my dad had always taught me since I was little. However, when I panicked, I completely threw that out of the window.
