Seriously? Seriously. So in my last post, I was all “we should appreciate stuff” and “we’re so lucky” and stuff, right? Riiiiiight. And now, here I am, in a super-de-duper important class – in fact, the FINAL class I need in order to receive a masters degree in International Education – and all I want to do is tune out.

Research, as many of you are well aware of, often includes something many people refer to as “numbers”. And for those of you that know me, you know that me and “numbers” do NOT get along. We fight. We squabble. We do not, unfortunately, have a witty repartee in the vein of a Katharine Hepburn/Spencer Tracy film. Indeed, it’s ugly. Right now in class we’re having a conversation about positive correlations and validity and reliability and a plus minus something rather, and I want to curl up in a ball. I have the sick feeling in my stomach that I used to get going to Mr. A*****r’s 9th grade math class. Why? Why do I feel this way?

Because I don’t like it when I don’t know the answer. I like literature, because while there are right answers, the emphasis is not on “right”, it’s on the conversation, the analysis, the idea behind and beyond something. Now, there’s probably that same discourse in the upper echelons of mathematics but I’m not there so I can’t speak to that. What I also like about literature is that it’s my strength; I get it, I know it, it’s my bag, it’s what I get down on.

Ok. So…what now? I am trying to make sense of this for me in the hopes that maybe it might make sense to someone else and this is what I think: when you don’t like something you should do it more. My professor is great and all this fear and frustration is my own. So I’m going to research like crazy and try to produce a cohesive paper that reflects my research on the validity of AP courses and I’m going to ask a million questions and look stupid but I’ll be better off because of it. I believe that it is – gasp! – okay to NOT always know the answer! True intelligence comes from knowing just how much you don’t know.

As a grown up (kind of?), I have to do things every day that I don’t want to; I don’t want to clean my apartment, I don’t want to do dishes, I don’t want to run errands, but I CHOOSE to because I accept the responsibility (and the fun perks) that comes along with being an adult.

So why tune in? Because I made the choice to pursue this degree, and therefore I won’t run away from it. And you shouldn’t run away from stuff that you don’t like either; however, that doesn’t mean I won’t procrastinate and write my essay at the last moment (I AM human, after all).

Edited to add: I just took a practice test for the chapter we just discussed and I haven’t seen a score that low since my horrific 9th grade math class. Awesome. Learning is greeeaaat.