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I think I’m going to fail

I’ll just start with a little bit of my background. I am the first in my family to attend higher education. I moved to England in 2013 and finished my GCSE’s in 2016 achieving A*-B’s in all my subjects. I applied for a local college since it was the nearest one (the nearest sixth form that is great is 1.5 hrs away from my location). I knew it wasn’t that great but I didn’t want my parents to pay over £100 monthly just for my transportation, never mind my uniform.

I picked Biology, Chemistry and Maths initially. I had rubbish teachers for all at some point in AS but I’m predicted a B for Biology. I dropped Maths (my teacher relied heavily on third years who disguised themselves as being first years and just said that we wouldn’t monkey around with the methods to solve the problems) and picked up A-level Psychology which is a lot of work but it’s been great and I’m currently predicted an A for it. Side note: my first year Maths and Biology teachers were so trash that they got fired.

The subject that worries me the most is Chemistry. Maybe my GCSE’s should have been a red flag (I revised the hardest for Chemistry and got a B and I was pretty disappointed about it but my friends didn’t understand why I felt upset) but honestly, I literally can’t see myself doing anything else except for Sciences. I knew I could have picked English (for which I got an A*) and taken the easy way out of college but English doesn’t excite me the way Sciences do. I had the head of Sciences for the first two weeks I joined college for Chemsitry. He was an eccentric fellow, passionate about teaching and Chemistry but he tended to be distracted really easily. Anyways, I thought it was great because he seemed like a really engaging teacher. Two weeks in and he says he’s not teaching us anymore and some other teacher will be teaching us. The second teacher was ok. Much of the class didn’t understand him including my Chemsitry partner but I was doing pretty well surprisingly in comparison to others. My grades averaged around B-C’s in tests. But three months in and he said that he wouldn’t be teaching us anymore as the college needed a GCSE maths teacher. (They literally could have gotten any student to do it to be honest, most of us were looking for part-time work).

Enter my current Chemistry teacher who currently holds the title for being the most rubbish teacher I’ve ever had in my 18 years of existence. Turns out that my second teacher was giving us the older easier papers (for OCR A) and that they had made the paper harder. The third teacher just slaps it in our faces and the layout immediately puts us all off. The second teacher hadn’t taught us all of the AS stuff but the third teacher never went over the ideal gas equation (I had to teach myself) or the stuff we missed. He rushed us. He literally can’t teach. Every time he tries explaining us something, he summarises too much. You ask him a question, he’ll throw another one back at you and walk off mysteriously. He won’t even tell us what we need to copy from the PowerPoint (like dude how am I supposed to know what I need to know?) For example, the mechanism for electrophilic addition? He only gave us equations and that alkenes react with halogens to produce dihaloalkanes. I went to the library, sat down with a book to revise and saw an entire page worth of mechanisms JUST FOR ONE REACTION OF ALKENES. And i didn’t know that the test of bromine water going colourless is based on that damn mechanism. I didn’t even realise how much stuff he was skipping until we started A2. My chemistry partner decided to re-do all her A-levels and she told me what we were missing. He also looks down us for not getting anything right. He’ll say “ah don’t bother with this because it’s only for A grade students,” or “you just need to know until this step for a C/B,” and that has brought my self-confidence in my own abilities really down. My revisions weren’t even revisions, they were reading the book and learning something new that was skipped in class and teaching myself. I’ve never felt this dumb or even insecure about my abilities. I was never a top student but I always knew I was above average. This is the first time I have felt this way. I’ve spent many nights crying and stressing. Even my parents have noticed that I have become rather irritable when it comes to discussing my academics and frequently lash out at them when they ask me about my studies. No matter how much revision I do, it makes no difference. Like sure, maybe I’m just dumb but what about 90% of my Chemistry class? I know it sounds like a terrible excuse for underperforming (I would be a millionaire by now if I got paid every time someone told me that) but teachers make a big difference. A good teacher makes you want to not let them down and makes you motivated because you understanding what they’re teaching.

I just sat the two papers and I’m feeling that biology was alright. But Chemistry has me in tears. The physical paper was so hard! I did the organic paper and I think it went better but idk man, I think I am just too dumb to understand the complexity of the questions.

I told myself in year 10 that I would never become a doctor because I knew it was a very stressful and difficult job. Once I got my predicted GCSE grades, I thought about what I had and decided that I would push myself and utilise the skills I had. It would be fulfilling job for me. My first childhood ambition was to become a doctor because of my childhood doctor whom I was very fond of. I finally decided to pursue what I thought I couldn’t do. But the head of science who ran a medics workshop told me that I wouldn’t be accepted for medicine since I’m a third year. I also was aware that my predicted grades at AS didn’t look very promising. I searched up biomedicine and transition into medicine and found a couple of unis. I thought great! But now that I think about it, I will be lucky if I were to scrape an E in Chemistry, let alone get the grade that I need. To be honest, I’ve just been lowering my expectations lower and lowering and idk what to even expect anymore. I’m stressing out, idk what to do. I’m overthinking a lot. My friends think I’m overreacting (because I’ve never had a problem with academics) but they really don’t understand how much help I really need. At least 5 people told my chemistry teacher that they weren’t submitting their practical books because they stopped caring about chemistry and their lab books were empty since they didn’t understand the practicals we did in class. Yes, that’s how bad it is.

What do I wanna do? I still want to do something Science based. I have thought about radiography but idk anymore. People have told me that if I do EPQ, I will have more UCAS points for university but is EPQ even the same as an A-level? What happens if I fail Chemsitry? What happens if I scrape an E? I want to know every possible scenario and solution in order to prepare myself for the worst that could happen.

I think I’m going to fail

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