Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: Dear Associate Dean,
I am writing you this letter today because I would not just like to, but desperately need to drop the course music 104 (winter, 2019).
When I first talked about the course with upper year students the course was advertised to me as completely different than what it was. These students said that the course was about learning to play music to the extent that at the end of the year one would have to send in a video of playing a musical instrument. This was not at all the case and the course actually turned out to use mostly classical music. It also turned out to be somewhat mathematical in nature. I have a learning disability that presents itself more prevalently when working with numbers and anything having to do with numbers then with words. Throughout my life I have always been far stronger in written subjects such as English and history than in maths which was such a devastating struggle for me that I stopped taking it within high school the second I could. This can be seen easily in my high school transcript. When this course first started, I worked hard for the first test and was happy with my marks, however; the further and further we delved into the curriculum I became more and more lost, and discouraged. I became acutely aware several weeks ago that this is a course that isn¿¿t healthy for me to be in and is draining incredible amounts of energy from my other courses but was to afraid and ashamed to attempt to get out of it.
The larger reason in general why I need to drop this class and why I was unable to drop it before the deadline is that I suffer from a mental illness, specifically anxiety. My anxiety, while not only being something that I struggle with daily and am currently in counselling for at the student wellness services, is something that is very closely linked with academics for me. I have dealt with a fair amount of trauma surrounding administrative systems and academic settings so knowing I was doing poorly in something and that my brain was not processing the information well was extremely upsetting and shameful to me. I also have a long history of, as a symptom of my anxiety and perfectionism, procrastinating from doing something important such as dropping a course due to feeling to tortured about it. I am a first-year student, so all of this is completely new to me. My high school didn¿¿t even have a guidance counsellor that organised classes and various things such as dropping courses so to be here and attempting to deal with an entire department of academic services left me rather crippled with nerves and ashamed. I kept wanting to try harder and keep trying but no matter how much I studied I still could barely bring up my grade and contributing this much stress and time to a course that brings me nothing but pain and confusion is proving detrimental to my other courses.
Music is not my greatest passion but an elective that I chose without all the facts. I want to be a history major as that is the academic subject I absolutely love and have the most curiosity towards, I am also doing completely respectably in my two history courses. As the way my grades and lack of understanding in this course is going now, I will most likely fail it, not due to a lack of trying, but a lack of capability and coping. If that were to happen it would bring down my GPA to an extent that I might not be assured entry into my choice of major which would be unspeakably discouraging. This course for me, the way I learn, and the way I think was a mistake. A mistake that due to all of the toxic emotions I had surrounding it I could not rectify by dropping it before week 8. I am now in a place where I am acutely aware that I need to drop this course and even though going through this process of appealing to do so is also causing my anxiety to increase exponentially, it is worth it to not fail the course and potentially destroy my future academic plans. I am not asking for my money back from this course and I am completely understanding of needing to show in my transcript that I dropped out but for my own mental health, future, and sanity, I cannot be a part of this class any longer.
Now that I know how dropping courses works, I won¿¿t let myself get into such a dyer place in the future. I have every intention of continuing my counselling and getting my mental health to an even more manageable place, I can solemnly promise that. I just beg you to let me leave this class.