Know Your Worth

06

The next day, I woke up late and missed my morning class for business. I blamed the late night that I had watching Lucifer with Kayla and Troy. 

Shockingly, I wasn't bothered that I had been absent from lessons. I felt very well-rested, something I hadn't felt in ages, and couldn't bring myself to wholly regret it. After all, I needed to be energetic to transfer what I learned to my long-term working memory. 

To do that, I had to sleep in for some days. Hopefully, it doesn't become a bad habit where I conveniently use it as an excuse to wake up late and miss classes. 

I was very good at convincing myself to do more enjoyable things than the more difficult but necessary ones at the spur of the moment, only to regret it as soon as a couple of hours later. 

Still, I did manage to look through my business notes and tried to watch the online lectures that were uploaded right after the lectures ended in the auditorium. The audio quality was poor, and since the camera had been a good distance away from the projector screen, the visual quality wasn't that stellar either. 

I gave up trying to decipher the words on the screen. Comprehending what the lecturer was saying was also frustrating, so I ended up just reading my notes, annotating them, and generating a list of questions from the parts of the passages that I did not understand and resolved to ask them during tutorial lessons. 

Okay, maybe after when the tutorial lessons were over, I'd walk quickly to the tutor and hopefully whisper my questions to her. I'm not that daring to ask my questions during tutorials. I wanted to avoid any judgment or eye rolls or sighs from the others, just like what happened in high school during calculus lessons. 

Considering that there were only five girls, including me in the business minor classes, it was quite intimidating to even answer questions that the tutor, Ms Robins posed. We were content to let the guys have their moments in the spotlight, with their cocky smiles when their answers were correct and their annoyed expletives when she would gently correct them. 

I just quietly took my notes and paid close attention to what she was saying, with the periodic sip of water or vanilla iced latte. 

One of the reasons why I liked Ms Robins was that she was pretty chill. She didn't insist on imposing the no food and drinks rule in the classroom unless it was a really big bowl of food that can make a big mess if toppled. She was fine with finger foods and snacks, and even brought her own Starbucks drinks sometimes. 

Java Chip seemed to be her favourite, and I noticed that she did own quite a bit of Starbucks merchandise. She would sometimes offer us pretzels or toffee popcorns, and never reprimanded anyone if they didn't finish their work. She'd just deduct some marks for the late work, but other than that, she didn't give any sermons or grievances whenever someone couldn't do their assignments. 

She was very amicable to extending deadlines and didn't make any disapproving looks when the guys swore loudly. In short, she was someone I could learn from. I didn't have to worry too much about offending her or angering her. 

That made the communication with her easier, and business wasn't so daunting anymore, solely because Ms Robins was a fun, chill, dedicated tutor. 

I wish I could say the same for Economics. I still had time after business lectures to attend the Economics bridging seminars, so I didn't have a good explanation to miss it. As much as it was easy to catch up with business after missing lectures, it was also very difficult to catch up with economics after missing even a part of the lectures. 

Any latecomers might as well not bother coming at all, because they would be completely lost. If I made the unfortunate mistake of zoning out for even a couple of minutes, the next hour and a half would be spent by me frantically flipping pages to make sense of what the professor was saying. 

Furthermore, there wasn't a fixed lecturer for the economics lectures and various seminars.  Different professors from the economics department would have a rotation shift of sorts, and their differing styles and accents made it rather burdensome to process what they were lecturing.

The uploading of the slides helped, but they were sometimes just a copy and paste of the notes and reference books, so they were kind of useless in that sense. 

The seminars were just slightly more interactive than the lectures, where students could just shout their answers in the lecture hall and have the professor reply. 

The seminars also focused on the application of the concepts to real-life situations, while lectures were just discussing the pure, theoretical content. I guessed the seminars were there as a crash course of sorts, to help with the exam preparations. 

For reasons unexplained, bridging seminars were deemed optional and the major seminars required at least 75% attendance to qualify for the course the following year. Unless you were a senior, attendance was meticulously taken. The tutorials required an 80% attendance as well. 

Business minor lectures and tutorials were the antithesis of my economics lessons because they were comparatively laid back. They were a lot more lenient with marking and grading as well. 

The economics department, on the other hand, had a fearsome reputation. There were plenty of horror stories from the sophomores and juniors that they were too strict with their marking, which regrettably, turned out to be true. 

It was close to impossible to get an A+. Many ended up getting Bs, with a select few getting an A-. 

I was many who scraped through with B minuses. I'd hoped I might get an A-, but that hope was crushed when my tutor, Mr Phan, smugly told the class on the first day that he was a tough professor to impress. 

He'd then proceeded to tell us about his twenty-eight years of teaching experience, and how having taught several batches of students, he knew all the different kinds of learners and could even predict the type of grades we'd get from our attitude and current quality of work alone. 

After that first ever tutorial with Mr Phan, many of my fellow peers forged strong friendships with each other over complaining, or even straight-up insulting Mr Phan for his uncompromising nature. 

I'd ranted to Sam about Mr Phan too, calling him a 'sadistic piece of shit garbage asshole' when he expected my class to finish a 7000-word essay on the Effects of Weak institutions on Nigeria's Economic Development and a 5000-word essay on what we could learn from the success of East Asian Economies in the 21st Century, all in one week. 

Sam nodded sympathetically and offered me more Masala Chai I readily gulped. 

Her major was Linguistics, and her minor was Religion. She also had her fair share of troubles, but since she was so passionate about her education, it was slightly more bearable for her. She understood the dreadful essays since she also had to turn in papers for her religious studies. 

We studied together, going on essay writing sprints after procrastinating on them in the library, and I was so grateful for her. 

I had made a promise to myself weeks ago that I was going to do well at Blackwell, and I intended on keeping that promise. 

I was also on a partial scholarship, so I had no choice but to keep my grades above a D- to continue receiving the financial aid and monthly allowance.

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