Accountable – Priscilla Hernandez

I hope you enjoyed the dramatic introduction to my first reflection. It shows the English major in me. If you couldn’t tell by the title and my poetic blurb, I am going to tell you about my relationship with my room. At first, I was excited to be in that room. My room had the space and privacy I craved. But when classes started, the punches started coming and I was not rolling with them. After the first week of classes, coming home to a personal kitchen and bathroom was lovely.

As the weeks went by and the homework increased, my room wasn’t the place I thought it was. I would sit and rot in my room instead of going outside to do any random thing that would help get me out of the funk. I kept telling myself that I would get out of bed or off my phone and start my homework. I didn’t. I slept late and procrastinated. Your room is supposed to be the place where you get to and know you can be yourself. While this is true, being in my room all the time caused me to feel stuck and unmotivated. I know I need to get out, but I don’t know how to do that. How am I supposed to find motivation when there are no incentives?

Sure, getting my homework done earlier sounds nice, but it’s still homework. Wow. That last sentence really shows how much my brain hates me. It doesn’t even want to help the rest of me. I have realized that I just need to get out. It doesn’t matter where, it doesn’t matter how, it doesn’t matter the reason, I just need to get up and go. For the sake of my sanity and all my homework and deadlines I need to get out of this room and go just do.

Since my freshman year of college, I have struggled with studying. I didn’t learn how to study in high school because I didn’t have to. I was one of the “smart kids”, who got good grades, not because she studied all the time, but because she always did her work well. It didn’t help that the administration at my high school separated each grade level into 3 classes based largely on academic performance. There was never an emphasis on consistent studying. You had to make sure you got it right the first time around.

At the university level, you are expected to know how to study. There are no classes that teach you how to study, which is something that I think would be very beneficial, especially for FGLI students like me. I took a test in my Latin class and studying for it was really hard for me to do even though I knew what was going to be covered on the test. I didn’t know how to prepare, so I relied on my ability to retain information which inevitably caused me to forget the grammar structure that was on the test. Knowing how to effectively study would have helped me fill in that gap so that I wouldn’t have to panic or feel insecure about the test afterwards.

I don’t even know or understand what studying actually means. Is it sitting down and reading over your notes over and over again? Is it memorizing certain subject areas? Is it a combination of the two? I don’t know and maybe I will never actually know how to study. It seems to be easier for everyone around me because they just sit down and get right to it. Since freshman year, it feels like I have been bombarded with having to do this skill that I simply cannot and now it feels like it’s too late to even ask. I hope that someday studying will get easier for me, but I know that today is most certainly not the day.

Category: Accountable

My Apartment: Exciting to Frightening

Studying and it’s never ending struggles