I've Had Better Days...

Today wasn't my favorite day of my experience at Vanderbilt. Today was the day of my presentation and during it everything that possibly could go wrong, went wrong. I had a lot of technical difficulties and overall I felt as if as much as I prepared for my big debut, I wasn't prepared enough. Teaching a class was a lot harder than I expected. Although I tried my best to explain certain things to the of my best ability, I felt like I let the whole class down. After my lesson, the teacher asked some of the students to give some commentary about the lesson. They gave me some positive feedback but I still felt uneasy about it. 

I came back to my dorm room pretty sad. I felt like a failure but my friends on the floor helped me. Abigail, one of my classmates, said that it wasn't as bad as I thought it was, which made me feel a little better. My roommate, Karina, and my neighbors encouraged me not to give up. Later on in the day Meg, my proctor, told me that I should take this situation and make it a learning experience. Having this great support from my friends really helped me get through my day and motivated me to do better. The great thing is I have another presentation and I will not make the same mistakes and I will do better. 

VSA is very enthusiastic when it comes to getting all the students to be involved in activities that include everyone. As of this morning a game of Assassin or spoons started. In the game, everyone who is participating has a spoon with their name on it. The spoons are distributed to random students in the program. I got a spoon with Austin, a proctor's, name on it. Therefore he was my target. I am suppose to sneak up behind him and "kill" him. When I "kill" him I take his target. In this way the game is continuous until there is a winner. I was able to "kill" Austin and get another target. But honestly, I am not going to last very long in the game. 

For the evening we had a proctor group night. But this time we went with another proctor group as well. Our proctor group decided to go with Tommy's proctor group (hence Tommy is another proctor). We all went to Chili's. Tommy and Meg, the two proctors, decided to split us up and made sure that there were an even amount of both groups to each table. Today I sat next to Chiamaka, Conner, and Clay. Clay and Conner were very interesting. While we were talking about our schools, I noticed that some of the key differences between the two. For instance, we talked about the standards our schools have for the student academically and how they were different. Since Clay goes to a private school it was interesting to hear how schools like that are. 

Today was a challenging day. I went from being completely ready for something to being discouraged from doing anything. If it wasn't for the great people who were surrounding, I wouldn't be motivated to be resilient when it comes to my mistakes and my bad experiences. Although today may not have been what I visualized it to be, I can always try my best to make tomorrow better.