Confidence

my confidence in myself increased a bit in the last hour or so, especially in the area of confidence in myself that i am actually smart. college is a good place to lose a lot of confidence in your level of general knowledge. some classes are impossible, and others just don't make sense. some, no matter how much you study, you get the same grades on exams. professors make you feel uneducated, and truthfully, some people are just too smart. nonetheless, i have come to the conclusion that i could be so much smarter if i actually put the effort into learning the material rather than cramming it all in my head the night before

first occurance: physics exam. i knew how to do 13 of the 15 problems. i could easily get a 80 percent on the exam when my other two have been right around 50%. i realized that if i actually paid attention in class instead of sleeping (which i had been doing for the last few weeks), i can understand it and not have to worry about it at the last minute. granted, i still had no clue how to do two of the problems, but my excitement level was so high that i really didn't care about figuring it out.

second occurance: today's final jeopardy question was "alphabetically, what are the first two state capitals named after US presidents?" jackson and Jefferson city. now i've always been pretty good at geography (heck, who else brings an atlas on spring break when i'm not driving just to know where we were?), but i've never been good at the president thing, yeah, i can name most of them, but truthfully i have no clue when some of these guys were president...in this case, it didn't really matter about the chronological order, but in the case the question asked " cronologically, name the first two state capitals named after us presidents," i would have had no idea how to answer...jackson, jefferson, lincoln, madison...no idea.

my point is, i could be so much smarter if i actually put the time into it. i never study and i put off my homework till the last minute, so when it comes time for two exams and a lab notebook due all within two days, i have 3 weeks of physics notes to study, 4 weeks of microbiology notes to study, and 5 weeks of microbiology lab writeups to do. so, since sunday night i have been mostly doing the lab writeups, which take forever, and studying. i didn't really sleep, and i even forgot to eat once or twice. i put myself through hell for three days when instead i could just write the lab writeups shortly after lab and do better on them because i actually can remember what we did in lab, i could take notes in class instead of sleep, or i could do my physics capa for myself, not just use the answers on capa to do my problems.

i'm gonna try to do that...