How to Put Out Fires: The Honors Guide to Catastrophic Failure
By Hunter Priest
Sometimes in life, it feels like everything has been rigged against you. You’re trying your best, but your best just isn’t enough to get ahead when there are a thousand things outside of your control dragging you down. If this accurately describes your situation, this article isn’t for you.
This article is for people who are completely responsible for the burning wreckage that their life has become, for the people who definitely tried but could maybe have tried harder when it counted most. If you are the unlucky Honors student somehow failing a class or three, I have good news for you: the semester isn’t over until it’s over. You both have and deserve the chance to turn things around. But oh, dear god, you need to act fast.
Having recently escaped from the jaws of complete academic disgrace by the skin of my teeth, I have some morsels of advice to offer. The first: take action. Depending on the class, it is well within the realm of possibility that you can go from an F to an A over the remainder of the semester, but you need to be both fast and decisive. You have more room for error than you do for second guessing yourself, so figure out what you can do to fix things and do it. Is there extra credit? Do the extra credit. Can you turn in any missed assignments? Then do that. Do you get points for participating in class? Then find a way to participate.
It might help to do some introspection about all of this. Knowing how and why you got here can give you a better idea of where to go. That said, it can also keep you frozen. If thinking about what you could have done differently is going to prevent you from doing what needs to be done now, then don’t. Worry about how to avoid this in the future once things have calmed down.
Ultimately, whatever went wrong, fixing it is going to take a lot of effort. You’ll probably have to make a couple sacrifices, giving up otherwise free time to pour your energy into the process of putting out these fires. Make your peace with that now. Trying to have it both ways is going to unnecessarily prolong this process.
My second piece of advice is to ask for help. You are under no obligations to make this harder than it needs to be. Ask friends to hold you accountable if you’re having trouble getting started on an assignment. If you’re failing a class, ask the teacher. Odds are, the conversation will make the goals you need to pursue in the immediate future a lot more obvious. In my case, there were at least two opportunities I had that I would not have recognized without asking for help. Ask for more extra credit opportunities, ask for a chance to turn things in late. The worst they can say is no, and odds are, the answer will be a lot better than that as long as you’re polite. Your professors are here to help. I felt like I wasn’t in any position to request assistance from them, like I had committed some personal sleight against them by not keeping up with their class, but in my experience, that’s not how most professors are going to see it at all.
The third and final step to un-breaking your life is to have fun and be yourself! Getting this done is not an easy process. In order to have the best odds of success, you’re going to need to make sure you’re taking care of yourself. Get enough food, get enough water, and most importantly, get enough sleep. Adding in sleep deprivation and other ailments to an already difficult task spells disaster for you. In the words of sage and poet Scott Steiner, “the chances of winning drastic go down.”
If you’ve found yourself disorganized and exhausted enough to let school fall to the wayside, there’s probably some other intellectual pursuit, one you enjoyed for its own sake, that you let get away from you as well. While you are in the process of reorganizing yourself enough to properly handle things, it might be worthwhile to revisit it. I took back up my Japanese Vocab flashcards while I was putting my life back together. They made for a great way to shift into a productive mindset or take a break, and they significantly improved morale, which is a more vital factor here than I realized at the time. You will make significantly more progress in a good mood than in a bad one.