by Kurt McDonald
My life is a David and Goliath situation, especially regarding education. I look at my life and feel I am looking upward to a giant of an obstacle. Because I am hypoglycemic, I have had an uphill battle with short-term memory loss, making higher education a bit more difficult. With this form of hypoglycemia, if I become too stressed, don’t get enough sleep, or my blood sugar drops too low, I begin to convulse with a grand mal seizure. Because of the physical violence the body sustains during these seizures, the brain takes quite the beating, which is what creates the short-term memory loss. On top of everything else, the results of a seizure could be life threatening. I could choke on my tongue or suffocate on anything that anyone puts in my mouth. Or, because I become immediately unconscious, I could fall and sustain mortal injuries, such as breaking my neck. If you want to see what this looks like, you can click here. The entire body becomes tense and a person loses control of everything in his/her nervous system. This is also a mild one compared to what some might look like which would include greater motions of limbs, loss of bowels, and blood from the mouth. I say this not to scare you, but to impress upon you the great difficulty one must overcome that lives with a condition of this nature.
Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book entitled David and Goliath, which is a book about learning to understand difficulties and taking the good out of them. There was a story of a student that was accepted at one of the top universities in the world. She was very smart, probably in the 99th percentile in the country, but when she compared herself to the other students at such a prestigious school, she didn’t feel intelligent and switched to an easier degree than science. I know how the student in Gladwell’s book felt just in a different way. I never used to have to study to pass tests, I felt intelligent. But now, I can study hard for a typical exam but struggle to earn a C or a B. Most of my fellow students can study for a few hours to earn the same grade that takes me 1-2 hours of study every single day so that I can commit the test terms to memory. I remember nearly breaking down in tears and crying in front of my professor and friends in class during my finals of the undergrad program at Tabor because I tried and tried but couldn’t pass certain tests because I could not commit the amount of material covered to memory.
This is why I’ve learned to enjoy the research aspect of schooling. I can dedicate time to my study and the results are meaningful enough that my memory records them better. Where I have begun to fail in test-taking, I have begun to excel in research. Where there were once tears of frustration, comparing my old self to my current self, I now find myself smiling as I’m reading a book, learning to use critical thinking skills applied in research efforts. The struggle that I have encountered has led me in a new academic direction allows me to serve a more fulfilled life, overcoming the giant before me.
“The opinions expressed by the Tabor College EML student bloggers and those providing comments are theirs alone, and do not reflect the opinions of Tabor College. Tabor College is also not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information in the post.”