Monster midterms: My first encounter

I went to a high school where we never had this monster people call midterms, so coming to college was a whole new fright fest.

An open mouth gaped on the table before me, its black and white features blurred as I studied its face for hours, waiting for it to consume me. It breathed out its gross smelling breath that smelt like stale newspaper facts and moldy, old TV advertisements.

I didn’t want to reek of these facts but it was the only way for me to pass my midterm.

Attempting the osmosis effect of studying, that if you sleep on textbooks you could retain the information

Textbooks are always haunting you to study them and there are the pages upon pages of notes from lectures to study.

I mean there is always the option of not studying, which is very tempting, but then I remember how much midterms are worth, and how much it could absolutely kill your grade.

It’s kind of like The Hunger Games, where if you don’t get a weapon or backpack from the cornucopia in the beginning, you have a good chance of being killed or awaiting your death.

Just like if you don’t study and you fail your midterm in a class that doesn’t have any other grades, you’re basically screwed.

I think that’s the scariest part. You could study for hours to go into a class and fill in all those bubbles on the scantron, just to find out you got a C or worse.

It’s like you wasted all that time studying for nothing.

Me far more interested in my animal crackers than my textbooks

But as a freshie who has never taken midterms before, I studied for hours. And even with that, I still realized I coudn’t retain the jib-jab they make you memorize. I found myself staring at the ceiling for answers in my communications exam and getting easily distracted as the other students sped ahead of me and finished their own monster midterms.

The desktop attached to the chairs began to squeak, the doors slammed shut and were grabbed open, papers were rustling, backpack zippers were zipping back up.

I could hear the sighs of relief as students around me finished the exam.

It felt like even other students’ monster midterms were creeping up on me.

As horrible as my own personal experience with midterms was, as I asked around my dorm and found many of my friends didn’t think they were that bad.

I asked if people thought midterms sucked or if they weren’t too bad, and one of my friends even said, “You don’t have the other category: the people who loved midterms.”

I of course replied, “Nobody loves midterms.”

Making a good point, he responded: “Well that way, you know who to stay away from.”

Maybe I should have included that category.

Anyway, for someone who has never taken midterms before, they could have gone a lot worse. And I think I may be on my way to learning how to punch those monster midterms in the face.