Today was our first maternity test.

Maternity, as a class, carries a special kind of a terror with it that no other class possesses.  You see, Maternity is taught by a teacher we all call The Riddler.  Her lecture style is right up my alley.  Lots of information encased in lots of jokes.  Awkward pauses.  Massive 6-foot-tall pictures of vaginas on the projector screen, just to watch us squirm.  I love the Riddler.  Trick is, her tests, as you might have guessed, are a wee bit tricky.  Impossible to predict.  Impossible to prepare for.  Just learn everything you can and hope like hell that it’s enough.  There’s no way to ever feel good about going into an exam with The Riddler.

Last night I was going through my 50 (literal number) pages of class notes and power point presentations for today’s test (a 40-question test), when I decided to make a few note cards.  I wrote out a notecard for everything she’d written in all-caps or bold print, and everything I thought I needed to spend a little more time with.  I wasn’t scientific. I just wrote out a bunch of notecards.  My learning process is not scientific.

And tonight, I’m left with an unmistakable air of satisfaction.  Not because I totally pwned that test, (after all, one should never be overly confident about the outcome of a Riddler Test until grades are posted,) but because out of the 43 notecards I wrote last night, 31 of them were test questions.  Grading scheme aside, I can’t tell you how good it feels to know that I looked at a stack of 50 pages of information and somehow managed to extract over 75% of the testing material onto little 3″ X 5″ cards.  Victory.