Mortaine’s Blog

Well, today I went to take the second part of the MA exam. I failed. I know this because I couldn’t even finish the text. Two of the three sections were on poetry, my weakest area.

One of them seemed to expect you to know the authors and historical contexts of the poems themselves, without the exam question actually stating who those authors were. I hate tests like this– I’m pretty bad at remembering names and dates, so figuring out who wrote which poems would have been difficult, even if I was really strong in poetry. Which, as I’ve said, I’m not.

I walked out at 10:30, having only answered one question. I am going to have to re-take the exam in November. This sucks. It means I have to study– again. It means I won’t get my degree until December at the earliest. This might make teaching the science fiction class next Spring somewhat difficult. It may mean I have to take the Poetry seminar next Fall (this is the seminar that is unofficially required in order to pass Part II of the exam).

On the plus side, it also means that I will get to take the exam when I’ve had more time to prepare and feel more confident. I guess that’s a good thing.

I feel awful. After I left the exam, I started crying because I felt like such a complete and utter failure. It’s one thing to be prepared and to do the best you know you can do and to fail. It’s another thing entirely to know that you could have done better and didn’t.

Usually I have bad dreams. For the last week, though, I’ve been having bad sleep. Lots of tossing and turning, waking up in the middle of the night, etc. Weird dreams, more than bad ones, I guess. And, of course, this is frustrating because I need to sleep my full amount of rest at night, every night, because of my new schedule.

Come to think of it, this is probably just a schedule change thing anyway. Hopefully, I will settle into my new routine soon. My normal sleep routine is to have a nap in the afternoon. I know I’ve been missing that!