It all started with ELS 311- Discourse Analysis and Pragmatics- the most complex and bulky course I have ever taken since my first day at the university. It would have been a different story if we had good and up-to-task lecturers teaching the course. Not only were the lecturers in charge of that course lazy, but they also didn’t care about their students. Whether you understand the course or not is none of your business- as long as they drop materials, they have played their part. As long as they sent PDFs to the class governor, they felt they had fulfilled their obligations. To worsen the situation, we had three different lecturers teaching that course. I don’t know if others feel this way, but I don’t like it when more than one lecturer handles a course. You get contrasting opinions from them and you'd be confused on which one to follow. It would have been better if one out of three of the lecturers cared about us and took their jobs seriously, but none of them did.
Our seniors warned us that Discourse analysis should not be toyed with because of its complexities and voluminous nature. They told us that for better understanding, we should start reading the course from the beginning of the semester. There’s something about that course that makes you want to drop it after 5 minutes into reading it. Heaven knows I made efforts to start reading that course very early, but things weren’t going my way as I often procrastinated reading the course. “I’ll start reading this course tomorrow unfailingly.” “It’s afternoon already, I need to read this course when the day is new and the weather is bright, so I’ll start reading tomorrow morning.” These were the excuses I kept giving myself. One day, I was so determined to start reading the course, but fate had other plans for me. 5 minutes into reading, I slept off and wandered into dreamland.
I realized I wasn’t the only one facing this problem, my other coursemates were also battling procrastination. We finally concluded that it wasn’t us, but the course. The course was too complex for us to understand on our own. We needed the lecturers to break them down into simpler terms. Instead of reaching out to our seniors or trying to read further, I kept procrastinating till the deadline came knocking- EXAMS! That was when reality dawned on me and my coursemates. How could we possibly pass the course when we hadn’t been studying? Our heads were totally blank. So, we fixed an all-nighter class and tried to cover the course from the first page to the last. We started reading by 5pm in the evening and stopped reading by 7am the next morning (yes, we had breaks) and we were still unable to cover all the materials. When we saw that our brains could not take it anymore, we gave up, closed our books and said to ourselves, “what will be will be.”
That exam was one of the toughest I’d ever written. My coursemates almost cried when they saw the exam questions. Actually, some of them cried. The questions screamed, “this is the price you pay for procrastinating instead of reading.” Luckily, I schemed through some of the parts that came out and was able to answer 60% of the questions correctly. The remaining 40%? Well, I gambled my way- and hoped for the best.
One great lesson I learnt is never to procrastinate reading a course. Instead of waiting till the deadline, start reading very early. That way, you’ll cover more topics and save yourself headaches.
Thanks for reading.