Finals are over

As of today, I have passed another semester of the nursing program. And that is no small feat! Especially considering over 20% of my class flunked one of our courses. I am so upset about it. It's the class that's been causing my severe anxiety. What is even more upsetting is the professor's attitude which consists of--"Tough. We need to weed you guys out now so we can have a better pass rate for our school on the NCLEX." She makes us all feel really stupid, yet they told us coming in that our class had the highest average GPA the nursing school has ever had. These are really intelligent people and to tell them they are stupid really gets my blood pumping. Most of these students are appealing their grades. For two of them, this is their second failure so they will be expelled from the program since we can only fail one course in all 5 semesters.

Personally, I totally respect and admire this professor's mind and store of knowledge. She is also one of the writers for the NCLEX, so she's obviously respected in the field of nursing education. I think her style of lecturing is very conducive to learning. However, she covers a lot of material with huge gaps which she expects us to acquire on our own from the textbook or out of thin air. This makes it impossible to predict what will be on that test. She will declare she told us something in class, yet nobody can recall it except her. As another one of my classmates said, "She's a wonderful professor, and I've learned a lot in her class; but her tests do not reflect the knowledge we have acquired." She and I both got B's and we normally get all A's. I don't know if she has ever gotten a B before. I've only gotten one other B so this will make my second one. Even worse, she has totally shaken my confidence in my ability to reason to the point that I have had second thoughts about being in the nursing program. However, I’m not going to let her beat me down.

Only 3 more semesters of nursing in addition to 3 or 4 more summer semesters to complete. My first summer semester begins a week from today. I'm not particularly looking forward to either class since one is art appreciation and the other one is World Civ II which really hold no interest for me.

As for my one week vacation, I plan to catch up on SEMMA bookkeeping, catch up my checkbook, clean my apartment, and then do the fewest number of constructive things possible. I feel the need to go to the library and get some purely insignificant fiction, take my lounge chair to the lake, and indulge.