It's The Final Countdown

I never thought I’d say this, I know just how crazy it sounds, but I miss finals at Berkeley.

Woah. 

Here’s what I’ve realized- finals are going to suck no matter what. It’s just a matter of deciding which sort of suckiness you prefer. 

The Berkeley Final- You regularly forgo sleep over the course of a semester just to have it end in a week or two of all nighters. You haul around books and readers dooming yourself to a life of chiropractic nightmares. You read and read and read, accept defeat, attend office hours, do problem sets, and by the end of classes maybe have something like a tenth of everything your professor has said mastered. You highlight you reread you redo the problem sets. You take a final and pray with all your might that you nail average. All hail being spectacularly average. 

The University of Ghana Final- You spend all semester trying your very best to decipher accents. You sit in sweltering heat with professors that may or may not decide to show up either physically or mentally. You hear rumors of readings but locating them is a whole other horse and pony show. Then, despite feeling like very little productivity has occurred during lectures, you pull out the syllabus because in the end you are being tested on that and really not much to do with lecture at all. Then comes the truly daunting part: finding all those forsaken books. Here. In Ghana. 

I have spent more hours tracking down books than actually reading books. There are many libraries here. Some you can check books out from, some you have to read there. And some books I swear are a fabrication of the professors imagination. The Berkeley proxy server doesn’t seem to work in Africa, so that means soliciting friends to pleasepleaseplease find me journal articles. It also means getting in near yelling matches with UG librarians who don’t want to let me check books out because I’m only here another month so it’s not worth their time to put books under my name. 

That’s like saying I only have a month left so may as well kick me out of the dorms now. Who needs a bed for their last few weeks anyway? Who needs books for finals? Silly Brit. 

Moral of the story- You can suffer the devastating stress and defeat of finals because you’re expected to learn more and be brilliant beyond your capacity or you can suffer the devastating stress and defeat of finals because your professors showed up to half their lectures and the library holds its books hostage.

BE GRATEFUL FOR YOUR FINALS AMERICA. Ha. 

In other news, had a fantastic weekend in Togo this last week. I’ll get to updating on that as soon as I figure out the difference between an exegetico-theological study of Matthew, Johannine Literature, and the writings of Paul.