Celebrating Failure

1) Academics have always been an important part of my life, and never has that been more true than while I have been studying here at UF. It should come as no surprise then that, although it did not occur in this class, my instance of failure was academic in nature. In addition to this online class I am taking Beginning Arabic 1 and an upper level political science class online for my major. Arabic has been going extremely well, but I feel as if I have failed on a number of occasions in my political science class. The failure I have experienced in this class, and continue to experience in this class, is my failure to adequately complete the readings and lecture videos for the course. I have completed all of the assignments with great success, but I find myself disinterested in the lectures and readings, something I have never experienced with one of my major classes before, which I usually enjoy. These failings came to a head with the midterm, which I thought I would just be able to skate through despite neglecting much of the course content. I ended up with a C on the midterm, bringing my grade down to a low B. Despite this experience, I have continued to fail in my attempts at keeping up with the content for this course.

2) At first glance it would seem that I have not learned anything from this experience, especially since I continue to exhibit the failing behavior. I do, however, think I have learned a couple important things from this. The primary one is that online classes, unfortunately, are not for me. I have enjoyed this class quite a bit, and found the assignments more and more engaging as the semester went on, but my experience in the other course has put me off of them as a whole. I think this is indicative of a couple different things for me. One is that the act of being in a physical class and interacting with classmates, something that I enjoy very much, is very difficult to replicate in an online course. I also think that being in a physical classroom is a big part of engagement in the first place, for me at least. While studying here at UF I have found that I am really good at making myself go to class, even if I am not necessarily feeling great or interested in the class, and I think that would be useful given my disinterest in this course content and the way it is being taught.

3) Failure for me has always been difficult, especially academic failure, especially because much of what I consider failure is me holding myself to standards that are unreasonably high and then not meeting those standards. I have found failure to be embarrassing on numerous occasions, often for the same reason I noted above, it's a failure to meet peoples' expectations of me, or my expectations of myself. I think my emotional handling of failure is usually okay, though sometimes I let it get to me more than I should, instead of just moving past it and changing things. I think this is a quality of mine that extends beyond failure, though, I think I have problems with overthinking things in general. Behaviorally I think I handle failure a bit better, but even then it's not particularly good. My example with the political science midterm is an excellent example of this. This class has almost certainly changed my perspective on failure. I may not be more likely to take risks than I was before, but I feel like I doubt myself less when beginning something that I have a chance of failing, and I think overcoming that is half the battle.