I'm taking college classes. Last semester I took Statistics. Straight up bragging: I got an A. I wish I was kidding when I say that class almost crushed my will to live, though. It was so confusing, the material so obtuse, the concepts so vague... there were many times I actually just gave up and broke down crying. I don't know that I ever felt so stupid, and I mean to use that awful and harsh word. I missed the tiniest details as often as I missed the most obvious differentiation. It ground my confidence to a fine dust.
But, I worked hard. Like, HARD. I studied, read, practiced, and still I kind of sucked at it. I can only remember a vague something about binomial distribution, but I aced the tests and put my best life-earned skills into the group projects, so I think that's what brought me to the top.
This semester, I'm taking Political Science. So far, I love it. It's so interesting. In addition to our textbook, we're reading A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn. It makes my heart ache and my eyes well up at how pointlessly horrible people are sometimes. But, he makes clear, we're not in this to, "recapitulate the failures that dominate the past" but, instead, "emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win." He hopes, "our future may be found in the past's fugitive moments of compassion."
I hope to hold that close as I consider the present political climate we live in.