Jessica Hung, Week 14 - A Letter to My Brain

Dear Brain,

It’s April. 

And I am physically, emotionally, and mentally burnt out. Why?

Because it is officially AP season!

In May, I have to face my worst enemy: College Board.

And I’m scared, nervous, and stressed. I rather spend a day with a giant spider (and you know that I am absolutely terrified of spiders). 

I’m scared that you will fail me. Every single bit of information that I have learned over the past year will completely vanish. I know that you have a PhD in forgetfulness, but I need you to pretend that your PhD does not exist for a little while.  

You are fully aware of my fears and nightmares related to these tests.

For AP Psych, what if I can’t remember who Freud is? For APUSH, what if I suddenly forget who George Washington is? For AP Calculus, what if I can’t remember all those formulas that look the same? For APENG, what if I can’t pull any information from my head for the argumentative essay? For AP Bio, what if I forget how DNA is structured?

What if I forget how to read English on the day of the test? 

I know the answer to these questions: I would fail all of my AP tests. The six hundred dollars that my mom spent on these tests would go down the drain. 

So, please Brain, collaborate with me during both weeks of AP testing. I need you to work properly. I know that you can do it! After all, you are a capable piece of mush. I promise that I will reward you generously after the tests. I will let you take a break afterward. Also, please make sure to tell your cousin Memory to work too. Thank you! 

Regards,

Your Desperate Host, 

Jessica Hung


Good luck to everyone taking AP tests! 

My Enemy in May
(taken from Google)

Comments

  1. Prathithi NellaiappanApril 16, 2024 at 10:39 PM

    Hi Jessica! Your blog about college board was both extremely relatable and incredibly written. Firstly, as AP season is rapidly approaching, all juniors are extremely stressed and I totally understand where you are coming from. In december, it almost felt surreal to even imagine sitting in the school gym or theater 50 taking an exam because it felt so far away. Now, in april, there is less than a month before ap tests and we need to start studying more seriously to make use of our limited time. It is extremely stressful but I am glad that I have my peers to rely on as well.
    I love the letter format of this blog because it is unique to the other blogs I have seen this semester. In fact, I think this blog is the first letter I have seen all year. I love that you use short sentences to emphasize your fear of AP tests while also using parenthesis and commas to add funny information in between. Your list of rhetorical questions in middle of your blog allowed the reader to visualize the brain of a highschool and understand the test anxiety we face. I also love that you added the college board logo for your image and captioned it “My Enemy in May” as it adds a comedic aspect of the blog. Finally, I wish you good luck on your AP tests as well! We will all do amazing!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Stavya GaonkarApril 17, 2024 at 7:42 PM

    I liked how you chose to write your blog this week in the form of a letter. I also thought it was interesting how you personified your brain as “Brain,” someone who funnily never helps you when you truly need it to, regardless of how much information you feed it. This blog post not only effectively connects to the theme of memory, as you plead throughout your letter for your brain to be able to remember the information that you have learned over the course of this school year in your AP classes, but it is also relevant to all of your fellow classmates who are most likely taking one or more AP tests as well. I can strongly connect to your sense of desperation in this post. Now that I think about it, it is really annoying that we basically have someone else operating ourselves, in terms of being able to effectively recall information, and it is completely up to them whether they are going to function or not. Although we can try to jam knowledge into our brains right before the test, they can be extremely unreliable. I have had this happen countless times on various tests in the past, and I certainly hope it does not happen again on any of the AP tests that I take this year.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Mansi MittalApril 17, 2024 at 9:31 PM

    Hi Jessica, this was a really amusing read, and I’m glad we can all unite over a very common enemy. That feeling of not remembering anything even when you’ve spent an entire year studying it is honestly something everyone can relate to, and it’s pretty maddening—I wish retaining information could be as easy as a file transfer to a computer through plugging in a USB. Despite the stressfulness of these nearly future-deciding tests, I really enjoyed how you completely lightened the mood with your comical desperation towards cooperation with your brain and your hilarious exaggerations (or not?) where you’d rather “spend a day with a giant spider” and the possibility of you “forget[ting] how to read English on the day of the test.”
    Overall, I wish you really good luck on all your AP tests, and at the very least, I’m pretty sure you won’t forget who George Washington is. Most likely.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Daniel ChenApril 17, 2024 at 10:53 PM

    Oh my god Jessica, I feel you so hard right now. With AP exams encroaching and with less and less time to study for them, I can't help but feel overwhelmed at the amount of random knowledge I have to memorize in order to get a passing score on the tests, and as Mrs. Smith always says, we are more important than Collegeboard, but sometimes it's hard to accept that we have to put ourselves through this in order to save money and get into a good college. The amount of dumb memorization that we have to go through is so painful and my brain is constantly betraying me when it comes to tests about the topics that public enemy number one requires us to learn about so that we can apply it to their test and never again in our lives. Although I will admit that the teachers are fun and the classes are sometimes interesting, the amount of stress and loss of sleep that I've gone through this year has been torturous, and to that I say, never again. I will never subject myself to all of these APs again.

    ReplyDelete

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