A Road Less Travelled

If you take the definition of humility as looking at yourself honestly (neither more highly or lowly than you ought to), this post is not nearly as arrogant as it might sound. I just thought I’d clear that up at the beginning.

I realized today that I am an intelligent person. Hey, stop laughing. Yes, you, I know who you are, and you know it’s true that somewhere under my occasionally ditzy exterior I’m pretty smart. This is something I already knew, but it was called to my attention today at class.

I was looking over my test scores so far in Medical Terminology, and figured up that with extra credit work, my average so far is slightly over 100%. At break time I walked out feeling pretty good about this. I was really happy with this whole ‘extra credit’ concept, because it meant that I had a decent shot at a 100% average for the whole class, even with one early test score of 92% when I was still getting the hang of things.

Suddenly I found myself in a discussion with classmates who were pretty sure they were flunking, and I realized that some of them were desperately hanging on to the hope of extra credit work to just give them a passing score.

Now, these are people who are undoubtedly taking a full class load, and in some cases had extenuating circumstances that cause them to miss class. I’m *NOT* saying that I’m more intelligent than they are, because I really don’t know that, or honestly, care.

And I’m not extraordinarily intelligent. Thankfully, I have a circle of friends who are generally even more intelligent than I am, so I don’t forget this.

But if I can maintain a 100% grade average on one college course, while maintaining an actual life outside the classroom, then I need to make sure I do something with this ability. Whether I go for X-Ray Technician after this or not, I need to make sure I’m using my brain for something productive on a regular basis, and that really needs to go beyond ‘What did this gray mush in the back of the fridge used to be?’ when at all possible.

I don’t regret having stayed out of the college classroom for this long. Generally, life, which is say, God, has thrown plenty into my path to occupy my brainspace and have to deal with. But it’s too easy get lazy and stop challenging my brain, and when that happens my brainspace tends to fill with lots of unhelpful daydreams and worries as my brain tries to occupy itself.

So, note to self: Whatever I plan to do next needs to include some kind of mental challenge. We’ll see if that turns out to be X-Ray Technician studies or not.