Below is a note Learner is turning in tomorrow with his exegetical notebook on Ephesians (which he is even now trying to finish) and his Daily Greek NT Reading Report, a chart of his attempts to read his Greek New Testament ten minutes a day, five days a week this fall semester. The killer was that no two readings could be done on the same day, and each week's readings had to be done days in that week, with a maximum of five days credit for any one week.
What's done is done, I suppose. Final exegetical paper due Tuesday.
Here's the note:
Professor,
You’ll forgive me if this sounds like a page of excuses; it’s meant as an explanation, but I suppose sometimes there’s little difference between the two. As you can probably tell by my Daily Greek NT Reading Report, I was not a very good member of the 10-Minute-A-Day-Club, reading only a measly 10 out of 63 possible days. I’m not proud of this, but I knew I was in trouble as soon as you handed out the sheet and gave us the assignment.
You see, whenever I try a reading program (in Greek or English), I always struggle because my obsessive-compulsive tendencies tend to work against me. How? Basically, the first time I miss a day, I’m sunk, especially when I can’t go back and “catch up” the missed dates as per your instructions. Thus, you can see I started well but missed a day that first week, after which I went downhill. I tried for a fresh start week five, but after missing a day (and seeing the empty spaces above from previous weeks), I suppose I gave up. It’s just really hard for me to finish something if I have a daily, visible reminder of the fact that it’s not going to be perfectly completed.
Part of this quirk is due to personality (INTJ); most of it is lack of grit. I regret not having done more of this assignment, not only for the sake of my grade, but especially because I wanted to do so much better in learning Greek than I feel I have this semester. Because of your teaching, I have learned so much about Greek as a language; however, because of my own failure to dig in and fight through my lack of ability (which led to my lack of desire), I feel like I have failed miserably in actually learning the Greek language.
I wanted to write you this note to apologize, as well as to let you know that I’m really trying on the exegetical paper. I’m sorry if I’ve disappointed you. Please forgive me.
Learner
PS: The reason the X’s are on the sheet is so I wouldn’t feel tempted to write down passages I didn’t read. The last thing I wanted was to add lying to my failure in completing this report.
