2nd essay.
Not sure which one I’ll present, but I’m currently leaning towards the first essay. Company-wide speech contest will be held sometime in November.
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Cramming
“The assignment is due next week right? I’ll do it after playing.”
“I’ll do the project later. The deadline is still 5 pm. I’ll still have time in the afternoon.”
“I know that the essay is due in an hour. Don’t worry. I can do it in five minutes.”
Yes, I am a crammer. I tend to postpone things for as long as I can. It’s not that I have more important things to do at the moment; it’s just that, at the moment, I don’t feel like doing the things that need doing.
For as far back as I can remember I have always been like a crammer. I don’t mean to brag but, even during my elementary years, understanding the lessons were not difficult for me. So even if I review the lessons just a few minutes before an exam, although I may not get the highest score, I could almost always get scores that were high enough to guarantee me a place in the honor’s list. I think this is one of the main reasons why I’m such a crammer: I could get away with it during exams.
Although I have to admit that projects and laboratory reports were a different matter altogether. High school was when I first encountered laboratory reports for science classes, and it was just impossible for me. Having gotten used to the crammer ways, I think that for the whole four years of high school, I was only able to submit about five lab reports on time. And I think that’s an over-estimation. An average person would have changed his ways by then, but I’d like to think of myself as not an average person – my quizzes and exam scores were high enough, that even with all the points deducted from my late lab reports, and even though I was no longer in the honor’s list, my grades actually belong in my class’s average.
I am already working now, and the thing is, I still cram. A lot. I know that I should change my ways, and believe me I have tried. But the thing is, cramming actually works for me. Not only that, I seem to have gotten addicted to the rush of it – the pressure of trying to beat the deadline that is just moments away, the uncertainty of whether I’ll be able to do it or not, and that sense of victory after having actually done it. Another plus would be that my brain seems to work better during cramming.
I have accepted my cramming so fully that I actually was able to make an excuse/alibi/retort: The reason why I was able to pass my exams was because I listened to the teacher while she was explaining the lessons. I asked questions when there were things I did not understand. That was why I understood the lessons without having the need to study again nights before an exam. All that’s left to be done is a memory refresher that could be done minutes before an exam. There is really no cramming done because I have actually done my studying on time.
Side note: As I was writing this essay, I stumbled upon an interesting fact. In Japan, a slang for cramming for an exam is糞勉強, which, if taken by parts, translates to shit (糞) study (勉強).
