Some of the struggles I have with school... (Why I refuse to "learn on the side")

Last semester I struggled a lot. I came out with a 2.4 GPA, which I am not happy about, especially seeing how good I'm doing this semester. What is the difference between this semester and last? I'm figuring out school. I've been homeschooled my whole life, so this does take some figuring out. But I am getting the hang of it. The fact that I am figuring this out is very little due to my own ingenuity, but due to the fact that all my friends help me out a lot and teach me how this works. But there is one thing that my friends try to convince me of that I refuse to go along with. I refuse to go along with the system. It seems that the system here is not to write well, know the subject matter well, or speak well. The system dictates that we exist only to serve our professors and to figure them out so we know what they are looking for and do that. The point is not learning, but people pleasing, and this irritates me to no end.

My friends love to learn, and so do I, so I asked them "When then, will I learn?" and I was told that what you do in school is "learn on the side" while pleasing the professor to get the grade. I have a big problem with this. Last semester we had a group project, and while everyone else chose which topic to work on by who else they would be working with, I chose to pick the topic that most interested me and that I most wanted to learn about without even thinking about what my group might be like. Only later did I realize that I now had a fascinating topic (homelessness and schizophrenia) but a rather difficult and dysfunctional group. In the end it was only okay because of my over zealous interest in the topic leading to me covering 11 minutes of the presentation rather than the 5 I was supposed to. Ideally, according to "the system" I should have chosen to do a project with my friend who I need would be good to work with, even though the topic interested me less.

This makes me so frustrated, because to be honest I really don't care about my grades or my GPA too much. I'm here to learn about things that interest me. Right now I'm preparing for a paper on Israel and Palestine and all the nasty conflict there. I could do this paper on anything I wanted, and I probably won't get an A because I've picked such a difficult topic that I'm not sure I can write about it so well that it would be worth an A. But that is the point. I'm not here for an A. I'm here to stretch myself, increase my skills and learn! Though I could probably get a better grade if I had chosen to write on something easier and more relevant here, such as the drinking or dancing rules here at Houghton, I choose this not only because it interests me, but because I know it will challenge me.

Anyway, that's just another rant from your beloved C. J. Clark, I must be off now. I hope you've enjoyed how much I've been blogging recently. I've just had a pretty light workload this week. But next week I'm pretty sure that will change...Cya.