Grades

I'll get along Arturo in this English-writing exercise. Seems like a nice challenge, although I'm not intended to go anywhere, anytime soon. It's just FOR THE LULZ, disregard the constabulary -and the postgrad education-.

I can recall all the times I had a test and failed to have the result I expected. Mind you, most of the times I expected a perfect test (because why the fuck not, I was the shit). While I was on elementary and high school, I knew by heart that the result was going to be good enough if I couldn't remember how did I answer or which were the questions. If I was able to get in the flow, things went my way. People would ask me how did I do on question one, what did I write to answer the last one, and I just had this poker face while answering them "I can't remember". It surely seemed kinda asshole-ish at the time, but I can tell you it was not mean.

When I was part of the team selected for the National Math Olympics (yeah, there was such a thing, every year), I enjoyed the challenge but never got too far into it. The clearest memory is this math teacher telling everyone in the classroom how good we are on math, "we are so good that even him -points to me- gets 87.5% of the answers right, yet he couldn't get to the next round". All this while shaking up my test in the air somewhere above his head. The memory ends with me laying my chin on the desk, looking past that teacher, the chalkboard and everything beyond it. I was just not good enough to get into more difficult -and interesting- things.

When I got into college, things didn't get any better. Quite the contrary, they went south for me many times. I was not the shit anymore and math demanded from me to actually sit the fuck down and solve exercises for hours. Things I never did before as a routine became the new normal and I reserved a couple of hours every day to practice my kung fu. Still, grades were not outstanding anymore.

Here is worthy to mention that one time I went on full Lisa Simpson. I had this Probability class with the toughest teacher of them all, the one that made people retire from the course (somethings that would happen several times on my time there), yet the first test was the same for all the course groups. I sat down that saturday morning and wrote and wrote, just as it was on the old times. When the results came back, I was the only one with a perfect score. I even answered the question whose correct answer was deleted when they were formatting the questionnaire. The teacher refused to accept ANY answer because they were all wrong...  but me, I wrote down why none of them was correct. Only difference with Lisa was that I DID NOT CHEAT, MAN! It was all me back there.

I took German courses while on college; all the tests were above 4.5 / 5.0 but never had a perfect one. Moreless the same thing happened with all the Physics and Engineering courses, where I earned my 3.9/5.0 CGPA.

When I got back my final test on the German course I took last month, it kept the same pattern of old. I learned some things, remembered many more and still, the goal I've defined for myself (to have the best score overall) got away by 0.08. Later thad day, I thought about all those small differences that always took me aback regardless of how often they showed up in my grades. Maybe it's just that I've never been too disciplined, dedicated or focused in one thing and one thing only. I'm always wandering around, so it just makes sense that I know many things, being a true master of none.

I'm a turtle, slowly wandering around.