While I am relieved to get the B in Intermediate Logic, this semester left me feeling quite frustrated with myself. Some of my friends told me that ‘everyone has one of those semesters,’ but I had hoped to get that out of the way my freshman year. The B in a 100-level geography class is particularly irksome, an unfleeting reminder of how hard I didn’t work.
The central issue was not in the difficulty of my coursework, but in how I responded to that difficulty. When telling people about the classes I was taking, I was always quick to emphasize how difficult logic was. In doing so I had already begun, slowly but surely, to build up a mental barrier to the coursework. Instead of asking for help with the problem sets, or devoting the time to them that they really needed, I wrote them off. “It’s so hard,” I told myself, which implied that I shouldn’t even try.
Worse, the difficulty of the logic problem sets allowed me an easy opportunity to put off my other coursework. “Logic needs my attention,” I would always say (it hardly ever got that, though). The idea of the logic problems became so imposing that actually doing them remained on the distant horizon. Honestly, I haven’t felt so immature about doing work since high school.
That being said, I’m still glad I decided to take logic. I think everyone in college should take at least one really difficult class. It lets you know you still have a lot to learn. When I finally did puzzle out the proofs, I got a sense of joy and enlightenment that only a truly challenging subject can provide. Had I known this was possible in advance, I could have worked at a better pace throughout the semester.
I won’t be taking such a cavalier attitude next semester. This record of my grades serves as a reminder of the imperative to do so.
