Goal 6 – General Chemistry [CHEM 101]
General Chemistry was a course I took in order to fulfill my General Education Goal 6. I have chosen to reflect upon a picture of my notebook for the class.
Chemistry is a subject I have always struggled to understand. Pair that with never having had a “real” chemistry class in high school since my teacher had never taught it before and did not know how to teach it, and a college-level chemistry course becomes my worst nightmare. However, after thinking about it, I realized that even if I still do not understand or know much about chemistry, I learned a lot about myself by taking the class.
My General Chemistry class taught me that I can be really disciplined when I want to be. It would have been so very easy for me to give up and stop trying when I was only getting 40-60% of the answers correct on my homework assignments that were graded for accuracy. I typically spent anywhere from three to five hours on each assignment, and even though I was allowed two attempts on each question, I still could not seem to get more than 60% correct on most of the assignments. I even went to a second-semester-honors-sophomore-chemistry-major student to ask her to tutor me, and this intro-level class was so difficult that even she was confused by my assignments. The majority of the questions were multiple-choice, so I probably could have blindly picked answers and done almost as well as I did putting three to five hours worth of work into the assignments. However, I still wanted to learn, so I continued working as hard as possible.
In class, especially during labs, I asked my professor lots of questions. Even though the material was bloodcurdlingly challenging, the professor graded us more than fairly, and I passed the class with a high grade. Halfway through the semester, I called home practically in tears because I was so sure that I was not going to make it through General Chemistry. My dad kindly but sternly reminded me that I had no choice but to finish the class, so I might as well give it my all. And that is precisely what I did.
As can be deduced from the image of a spread from my General Chemistry notebook, a great deal of time and effort went into studying and understanding the course material, and I am proud to say that it paid off!
