These are the times that try Mom's soul..........

I feel like I went from one stressor to another and I'm once again wondering how in the hell do Moms with teenagers make it through med school, with the kids turning out Okay? URGH!!!!

One month into school, my future Engineer/PhD geologist is now flunking her honors classes in Bio, Algebra 2, and Government. But has a perfect 100% average in Chinese and 97% in English? WTH????

Now if she suddenly decided to be a Chinese language interpreter for the UN one day, I'd FULLY support that as long as it was also either as a Scientist, Engineer, or Health professional. In words, I ain't paying for no "soft" degrees like dance, english, or psychology!! And with the way the world's shaping up professionally, folks majoring in soft areas are gonna find themselves competing for fewer and fewer jobs as time goes by. At least, that's what I think. Having said all that, I have a degree in a "soft" subject too, but I combined it with a hard core science because I wanted to eat regularly when I finished college, LOL!!!!

But my kids academic dilemma (which will soon be resolved after I put the "hammer" down), reminds me of where Black kids are today when it comes to academics and college majors. There are fewer American born Blacks majoring in science, engineering, medicine, and technical areas than there's been since the 80's, and the numbers are decreasing a LOT every year. OTOH, Blacks from Africa are happily applying to college programs in these areas in record numbers every year. So what I want to know is, how in the hell did American Blacks get to this place academically?

Moving on, I promised one of my loyal readers I would discuss what I finally ended up doing to prepare for the MCAT. And I changed my "strategy" so many times even I get lost trying to think of what I think finally worked for me. SO here's a list of a few things I found helpful:

1) I finally accepted that I was being tested on being able to identify the best answer not necessarily the right answer, and as a future Doc this makes a LOT of sense. When treating a patient, there may be several approaches one can take, but being able to identify the best one for that particular patient requires being able to see the broader view of things.

2) I timed EVERY SINGLE PASSAGE I DID which is why on the real thing, I finished with time to spare for the very first time on EVERY section.

3) I ended up eliminating the EK 1001 series questions for all the subjects except Bio and the reason I reviewed the Bio was because it was set up passge style. The MCAT hasn't tested significantly in discrete question style in over 20 years, so I realized early that practicing those type questions was a bit of a waste of time for me.

4) I repeated my difficult subjects over and over and over again until I had them down pat. Luckily for me, this wasn't required for the majority of the subject areas of the test. And when I saw those difficult area questions on the MCAT, I didn't have a moments worth of hesitation about answering them.

5) I spent twice as much time understanding wrong answers than right answers and I believe this is going to pay off on the real thing.

I guess time will tell if this worked or not, but as my sister/cousin would say, I'm going to speak a 30+ score into existance!