My winter quarter has come to a close and my professors are starting to put out final grades. I can see that I'm not going to get the grades I hoped for, and while it sets me back a bit, I know it'll all turn out OK. There's a certain GPA that I need to keep in order to get into my major, and it looks like it will dip below that requirement this quarter. The reason that I'm so calm about this is that I've been to the bottom before. My first quarter at college I failed my math class and it looked that was the end of my college career. Since then, I have grown from that experience and have realized that my grades don't reflect how smart I am. They shouldn't reflect how smart you are either.

When I failed my math class, I had a 1.6 GPA. I was put on academic probation and that didn't feel great. I was embarrassed to tell relatives how school was going, and I felt exactly how my grades were reflected. A failure. While I passed my other two classes, I was disappointed in myself for failing math. I had never failed a class before, and I couldn't figure out how this had happened.

Now, to give you a bit of background, I have never been particularly good at math. There are only two years that I remember from grade school that I did well. In both of those years, I had teachers who really cared about the students doing well, which is not something that I had in this math class in my first year of college.

In this math class, which the subject was close to algebra 2, it was taught by a grad student. This was something that I was hoping to avoid when choosing Western Washington University as a college because I had heard that lots of classes at the University of Washington were taught by grad students. The problem with grad students is that while they know lots about the subject, they aren't the greatest at teaching it. Now, I don't know what it's like to be a grad student teaching undergrads, but as an undergrad, being taught by them wasn't great.

To get back to my failure, I tried my best to pass this class. I'm not someone who parties much, and at my school, there aren't many that I'm aware of. I went to study sessions, reviewed my homework for tests and reviewed past tests for the final. With how hard I worked to pass, and this is my own opinion, I think that I was graded unfairly.

I did well on my homework, but when I got my tests back, I was blindsided by what I saw. In the instructions on the tests, it said that you got credit for showing work. I always show work on problems, but in this class, it didn't matter what you showed. If you got the problem wrong, you got no credit.

I bounced back from that class and was able to stay at Western. While the outcomes of this quarter are different than the one of my first as stated above, the same kind of feeling is still there. I won't be able to keep my GPA up with my final grades, and I know that I will bounce back from this as well. I know that I put in hard work to all my assignments, and if my grades don't reflect that, I know that I tried the best that I could, and that's all that matters.