Educated: Chapter 18 Summary & Analysis

Tara begins having trouble with Shannon and Mary. Her standard of cleanliness is vastly different from that of her roommates, and she begins to annoy them for not washing her hands, leaving dirty dishes in the sink, and showering only once a week. Tara is also running out of money, and worries she won’t be able to come back next semester. She sees that to get a full tuition scholarship, she’ll need a near-perfect GPA—given her struggles in her classes, she knows she won’t have one.

When Tara’s first exam comes up, she is woefully unprepared. She doesn’t have a standard blue exam book to write in and has to borrow one from Vanessa. As the exam begins—and the professor projects images and compositions onto a screen, asking students to write about the prompts displayed there—Tara struggles with her spelling, and resorts to copying Vanessa’s answers. When the exam results come back a week later, she receives a failing grade.

Tara remembers a time when Luke found a wounded owl out on the mountain and brought it home so Mother could treat its bad wing, pierced by a rogue thorn. The family kept the owl barricaded in the kitchen while it recovered, and occasionally fed it dead mice. The kitchen became foul-smelling and the owl grew restless. Tara and her family let it walk out the back door before it was fully healed—Dad said it couldn’t be taught to belong, and its chances were better out in the wild.

Tara wants to talk to someone about her struggles at BYU, and decides to call home. Dad answers, and Tara is surprised to find herself confiding in him about how hard things are. Rather than going off on a diatribe about gentiles, socialists, or the Illuminati, Dad tells Tara lovingly that everything will be all right. Tara knows that the moment of gentleness was a rare one as she hangs up the phone, but is grateful for it nonetheless.

In March, it is time for another Western civilization exam. This time, Tara studies furiously, and even gets together with Vanessa to review notes. When Vanessa tells Tara that all the information she needs is in the textbook, Tara admits that she hasn’t read the textbook—she’s only looked at the pictures. Vanessa is shocked by Tara’s naivete, and instructs her to read the textbook in full. Tara takes her friend’s advice, and earns a B on the exam. What’s more, the professor announces that so many people failed the first exam that he’s dropping it. Tara wants to high-five Vanessa—but Vanessa, bewildered by Tara’s strangeness, has moved seats.