When I was in first grade my mom told me that if I found a penny and put it in my left shoe it would bring me luck. As everyone knows no one can have too much luck, so I decided if one penny in my left shoe was lucky than two would make me twice as lucky.
It was not but a week later that I began to walk with a pronounced limp. After about two weeks my teacher asked me why I was limping and I explained to her about the pennies. I was promptly made to remove my shoe and she stared in disbelief as I dumped over 100 pennies on her desk. The next day I was added to the special ed class.
My stupidity isn’t the point I’m trying to get at here. It wasn’t even that I really believed my mom. Anyone who knows her knows to take what she says with a grain of salt.
She once convinced a neighbor kid we cut off our bird’s tail and made it into soup, but that’s another story.
Back to the point. A lot of people I speak to don’t know why they’re in college. And I don’t mean to get a career or to make money or because their parents told them to. These are all reasons but they are not really the reason why.
When I first started this higher education thing four years ago, I went because I never really considered any other option.
Since I could walk my mother had a career picked out for my two sisters and me, all of which would make her quite wealthy. Because she talked to me about college when I was two, I never considered any other option and didn’t even know why I was going except that everyone said it was the right thing to do.
And due to my years spent in special ed over the shoe incident everyone thought that I would make a great “something.”
So as with the pennies I believed that luck would get me through school. And as I have implied, I am a slow learner. It took me four years and two schools to figure out that luck doesn’t have anything to do with your grades. Nor does it matter if the teacher hates you, or you don’t agree with them.
I played that game for a while, my teacher hates me therefore my grades are low. If I’d gotten a teacher who doesn’t hate me then naturally my grades would be high.
And by doing so I took no responsibility for my grade. For all the effort I put into those classes I could have sent a burlap sack to class for me. The minute I realized that I was responsible for how a class goes during a semester, I realized I was in the wrong major.
Believing in pennies is great but it doesn’t bring home an A or even a C. Being a slacker might even be “cool.”
But then again I am a slow learner.

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