Sore Throats and Ink-Stained Fingers by Marwah

Sore Throats and Ink-Stained Fingers by Marwah - May 2016 Scholarship Essay

The anxiety comes in biting waves, a pulsating bitterness on my tongue. I am fifteen years old and about to take my final exam in my third-level Spanish class. As my teacher hands out the tests and answer sheets, I feel faint with nerves. A nagging voice in my head echoes tauntingly: you didn’t study and you’re going to fail.
The weeks leading up to final exams were once the times of the school year that I most dreaded. When I sat down to that Spanish III final, I realized, upon looking over the exam, that I was fully capable of answering every question; it was simply a matter of finding confidence, of finding confienza, in my abilities to do so.
I made it through my Spanish III final without giving in to the nerves, but I promised myself that I’d never again feel so unprepared. I entered my fourth year of Spanish with a fierce determination to lose myself in love for the language and to not allow the purity of learning to be tainted by anxiety.
Initially, I was unsure of how exactly to proceed with preparing for exams and quizzes. In other classes, in history and science and mathematics, my classmates and I studied with an intense focus on rote memorization and superficial understanding; we’d write formulas and the dates of battles onto flashcards and take practice tests to drill the method of proving a geometric equation into our spongy young minds.
There is nothing shameful in a facts-based education--by building as broad a base of knowledge as possible, teachers are providing their students with the building blocks of critical thinking skills that will serve them endlessly well in the realm of higher education.
I love learning in all its forms, but I don’t know that I truly understood the minutiae of encoding and cognition until I took my first Spanish class. To learn a language, to become familiar with its intricacies and quirks and its shadowy corners, is a mammoth task that cannot be brought about by rote memorization or flashcards. In studying for Spanish, I realized quickly that I’d have to gain a holistic understanding of the language to become successful.
I began by watching newscasts and reading every article I could find that was in Spanish. If there was a Spanish version of a movie I knew, I’d watch it in my free time. Immersion helped me to find a level of comfort in the foreign tongue that made it feel almost homey. I listened to music, read books, and talked to neighbors and friends about everything from personal characteristics to food preparation, supplementing my still-limited vocabulary with enthusiastic hand-gestures.
As the semester exams drew near, I finally came across the method of studying that worked best for me. I’d always been a writer, living for both verse and prose and filling notebooks with ink. When I write something down, it becomes tangible, whereas when I hear something spoken aloud, my brain wires itself to become familiar with that which cannot be quantified. I brought these two distinct techniques together a few weeks before my Spanish IV midterm exam.
Bored with the news article I’d been reading, I began to scribble, in Spanish, a few opinions I had about education and career paths. As my hand loosened up, I pulled a fresh sheet of paper from my materials and began writing a more cohesive piece about my goals, about my desire to study neurociencia and to attend una facultad de medicina in the future. As I wrote, without even realizing it, I narrated my hand’s journey across the page, reading words aloud as they appeared. For pages, I wrote as I read. My hand began to cramp and I began to simply read my piece, as I have at so many coffee houses and poetry slams, to my messy desk, speaking with a sure clarity that was then unfamiliar to me. I leaned back in my chair and felt a wave of calm flood my body. I was ready for the midterm.
When my Spanish IV teacher handed me the final exam at the end of the year, I grinned up at her before starting. I’d spent the last few weeks pacing my room and making speeches of my own writing. My family left me a wide area to my erratic ramblings, amused by how, when I was feeling particularly excited, I’d slam my foot into a wall or my bed and then hobble around the room, still pacing and still speaking.
I love to learn, and when I was just past sixteen years old, I learned how to translate that love from my passions to my classes. I began to adjust my study techniques in all of my classes, writing full-length papers to study for AP United States History and playing recordings of myself detailing Hamilton’s financial plans as I drifted to sleep. I made poems of chemical formulas, wrote stories about differential equations, and filled the voice recorder on my cell phone with hours of speech.
As I began my exam, pencil flying across the page, I heard in my head the same voice as the year before, warm and peaceful: I’m so proud of you.