Maybe try telling your teacher this and see if she can let you do some extra credit or something. When I did my student teaching, I noticed that some of the students were better at expressing themselves in ways that weren't traditional. I, of course, would do my best to help them understand the concepts, but ocassionally I would let them do an extra credit assignment for a few extra points. It really gave them the self confidence they needed. I even had a student who used the key terms and wrote a poem with them. He never forgot them after that.
