The Inability To Do Something
January 7, 2019 Uncategorized 7 comments aparent19
Have you ever had your mind set on something so particular that something so little just swoops into your life and messes not only one thing but everything up? Well in my case I have. In fact this particular thing happened for the first time this year.
Let’s back up a few years. I came to Oak Hill my sophomore year, I was introduced that terrible, awful, time consuming program that the school buys every year… MEMBEAN! Now coming from Lewiston we didn’t ever focus on anything related to membean.
I thought to myself on how I thought my freshman year consumed me. How it stopped me from actually living a life because of the difficulties I faced. I faced the inability to laugh when it came to facing math and English my freshman year. English was hard for me. It threw many curve balls that knocked me down, and really made it difficult for me. I thought that maybe it was just the different learning abilities that we all had. It wasn’t until I saw my grades and how they changed dramatically. I really struggles with the fact that my grades from the previous years at Oak Hill were so good that now at Lewiston I can’t seem to have the same grades. Before I went to Lewiston my grades had a score of 85 or higher, and anything lower I didn’t like. But it wasn’t until my freshman year that I faced a challenging situation.
My English teacher was not the nicest. In fact she actually scared me, I didn’t want to ask her a question because she answered so meanly. But one day I stayed after school to fix my work that I didn’t do so good on. Sometimes the answers were right in front of me but other times I had to talk to her. But one day I finally got the courage to ask her something, the one question that helped me fix an essay so that I could leave and go home.
Math was really hard, I was thrown right into algebra 1, I didn’t even get to take pre-algebra. But I failed almost all my test. I couldn’t do the homework, and nor could the teacher keep explaining it to me to try and make it easier. It wasn’t until my mom and her talked on the phone about me. We talked about if I stayed after a couple days during the week with her to work on math. But I thought to myself many times on what would happen if I just went back to Oak Hill, as much as I didn’t want to at the time I could not get my brother to come to Lewiston High School with me. I struggled with my grades and it Lewiston made it more difficult for me to pass, and I noticed it more when I went back to Oak Hill sophomore year
Junior year I went above the time differences for each semester. I did more minutes so that i could subtract my dubious minutes. Because I knew either way that when I did membean I would end up with dubious minutes. It was a given for me, but I didn’t let it knock me down and get me all worked up. Senior year came, and I started off right, but then dubious minutes came, and they were counted against you. Now i’m struggling with that. Because I know that no matter how hard you try and really out the effort in my dubious minutes will always count against me. At this moment of time it has given me the inability to laugh because I came to the point where I am not struggling with membean and i have found that dealing with it is making my life so harder because the more time I am spending on fixing my dubious minutes is time that I am not using to get other work done.
To finish off my senior year I will do all I can to finish and membean and be done. But I will not let someone fail me over something so little and not acknowledge all the time and the work that I put into something. I will not let this be the end of what could have been fixed. I will not let this be the problem that made dealing with it more difficult I will continue to do my best everyday to work for my dreams and not let membean be the one thing that stops me.
Photo by Gueorgui Tcherednitchenko on Visualhunt.com / CC BY-NC-SA
7 Comments
I understand your frustration with Membean. I too, have a hard time accomplishing what I would like with it. My struggle isn’t with dubious minutes though, it is with the quizzes. No matter how much I do I always seem to get a low grade on quizzes. But also like you, I do more minutes to try and counterbalance those grades. Yay Membean!
Yes, the terrible thing called Membean, I struggle with it as well, this year I started to fall behind on it trying to fix everything else on my plate. I remember trying to ask the English teachers to go back to the vocab book that they had us on but they said no sadly.
The title alone immediately caught my attention, as I can strongly relate to the feeling of not wanting to do anything considering I originally didn’t want to write these comments. I agree with you, Membean to say the least is rough. I have had a recurring struggle with dubious minutes. I don’t understand how I can get so many dubious minutes! I do membean, get a positive score, and still get dubious minutes. Recently I’ve been hearing that they count minutes dubious if you are on the post wrong answer screen for less then ten seconds. Well hey there, the only reason I’m ever on that screen is because two words that are pickable as an answer mean mostly the same thing, or I spell out a different word that means the same thing and don’t have time to count the letters because of the stopwatch to see if it will be the right one. So by the time I get to the post wrong answer screen I pick the right one because I already knew it was the right one, hell it was my second choice. I feel your pain, membean IS absolutely ridiculous and childish. Dubious minutes are distracting me from important work and slowing rotting my brain from the inside out with the incredible waste of time it seems to be everyday.
I completely relate tot he emotions you felt. It was like coming to high school made everything a mess and my grades started to plummet for it. Just like you thought I knew I needed to push myself to raise those grades, So after hard work and more time into studies I was able to raise my grades, so good job!
Now I got really interested when you mentioned Membean. Everyone struggles with Membean so much and it has failed many students through the years and it’s honestly not the easiest thing either sitting there at your laptop and studying words.
For myself, I go to work every single day and work thirty and a half hours on average because I will need money when I graduate I’ll need uniforms for basic. Just a little info there but I am so consumed with all the word given every single day. I wake up at 6:30 AM every morning doing my basic routine and head out the door for a long day go to school for six and half hours and then head off to work to be there at 2:45 until 9:00. Now when I get home the first thing on my mind isn’t Membean and no way in hell is anything else I just want sleep to do it all over again.
In the back of my mind, I know that I am able to do this and yes it does come with its struggles at the same time though I know that I am the only one to make this work so I stay up until 12 AM getting my work done not just for English IV but for all of my other classes that are also important. So I really did find your story encouraging and important and many people think High School is all that easy but to me life comes before school and nothing will ever change my mind but you still have to find a way to balance it all.
I think you did a really good job of summing up the average workload and stress that a teenager deals with, one that I can personally relate to. Even though a lot of the stress seems to be self inflicted on my end, I still can see how you feel about membean and such
Membean is so frustrating! I try to do it, I really do (sometimes I just forget that it is even a thing). However, there never seems to be the right time to do it. It takes up so much time, 45 minutes (+/-) over the course of a week might not seem like a lot. However, when you have 14 hour days (+/- depending on the person) each day sitting down to do it is a hassle. Sometimes I try to sit down and do it after work, but then I get distracted and without even thinking about it I just walk off and start doing something else! Then I’m like “oh I feel like I was doing something”, and come to the realization, and run back dreading the thought that I might have given myself dubious minutes! I think the worst part is that it does not tell you how many you have. So one day you might think, “oh wow I do not have to do any awesome” and then you find out you have like 30 minutes worth of dubious membean minutes and it is like “what the heck!”