Fitness first, and it’s a quick one. I’m not going to make my goal of getting below 250 by the end of August. I’m not bothered, but I am going to shift into a more intense plan for a short stint. Given the state of things, this shouldn’t be much more intense, more like getting back to more accurate measuring and logging of my caloric intake and making sure I’m getting enough exercise in. Thankfully I haven’t gone up in weight, and I have been trending generally lower for this month, so this should be fine. I am in search of some more HIIT routines, preferably those aimed at beginners and olds, and without jumping. But as much as I hate them, burpees have been the most effective exercise by far, so maybe it’s time to just start getting used to them again.
Alright, the rest of this is on how things are going for me academically.
I turned in my first paper for the English Comp. class I started on StraighterLine, and it came back with a pretty bad score. For a moment, I was quite upset at this, but that faded. Given it was top of mind, it didn’t take too much effort to remind myself that this is what I wanted. I did, then, briefly scold myself for having the reaction of a petulant child, but sometimes you’re just gonna feel what you’re gonna feel.
I went into the assignment thinking I didn’t really understand the ask. I’d spent some time looking around the site and the materials provided, which helped quite a bit. But at some point, I just couldn’t find anything that felt like a good foot hold. They did put up some examples, one of which is color-coded, and those gave me enough to get started. But I just kept rewriting everything over and over. I’d write a little, read a little, write some more, go to a different subject, come back and try to re-read the materials, then try and revise what I’d written. I felt like I was just running in circles around a cold pool, stalling, when I really just needed to jump in. So with my best understanding of the assignment, I sent off my first attempt, expecting to learn from the feedback. Of course, in the back of my head, there was always the thought that what I’d turn in was perfect, actually, I’d understood it all along, and I can just be done with this and all other classes. I am being a fair bit flippant, of course. But what came back was definitely worse than I was expecting.
Part of the initial frustration was with what I had taken as conflicting objectives of the assignment. The story needs to be pretty short (550 words) and yet completely develop the story and all characters within it. “You can’t develop characters in under 1000 words, what is this nonsense?”, I’d thought.
This is a pretty big takeaway for me, unspoken in the actual feedback. Yes of course you can develop characters, you just need to write more tightly. But I’m quite verbose, a characteristic which is occasionally quite helpful, but which is clearly not an asset in this situation. I do understand and value the utility of brevity, though I seem to have lost my touch for it. This exercise shows me that I probably don’t value it enough, and I certainly need more practice.
The rest of the frustration comes from the lead up to turning in the first attempt. I’d already made a good number of passes on the essay, tweaking here and there. I’d cut a lot of what I’d viewed as character development, trying instead to focus on the story. I also thought that what I was writing explained what things meant to me, but with the feedback, I can see I really didn’t explain that at all. Its more of a recounting of events, and lacking any human touch to how those events effected me. I also kind of didn’t think that’s what an essay was, and maybe that’s part of what has always bothered me about personal essays. The class is making it clear that I have seen this incorrectly, but I am still having trouble shaking the feeling that the personal, deep, important things in life don’t belong in a 500 word essay. Guess I’ll just have to get over that and give it another go.
You know, a part of the feelings come from thinking that I was doing things right to begin with. That I intrinsically understand the ask, put in the work with my revisions, and so I’m good to go. But that’s silly, it’s like a bad emotional habit I’d picked up from scenarios in grade school and a corporate job that I might now describe as “toxic”. It’s like having to deal with the shithead from work who is absolutely certain that anyone working from home is just slacking off at all times, or at least more so than they did in the physical office. In the office, this is the type of manager that acts like a warden, making sure the gen pop always stays busy, never an idle hand. My experience since the 2020 Lockdowns was finding that many daily tasks were actually easier to complete ahead of schedule when you worked from home, including a fair amount of collaborative work. It would force you to communicate clearly with coworkers, even in iterative work, and you’d end up with better work with fewer hurt feelings. Collaborative sessions that could have either been in person meetings or the dreaded Zoom Call were perhaps a bit more complicated, but thems the breaks.
Anyway, it was good to get the feedback. It also introduced me to at least one bit of grammar or syntax (I guess I’m not sure which this counts as) – the Introductory Comma. I must have heard of this before, though I really can’t recall. The way the website is organized is maybe less intuitive than its administrators might think. Following the feedback, I went looking for a section on the site that covers the topic and didn’t find one. But no matter, we live in the information age and I’m already at a computer, so I found some passages, a wiki article, and plenty of videos to fill in my lack of knowledge.
I also have some unrest regarding my Programming / Computer Science stuff. I’m still on the CS50x class, which I think in-person Harvard students do in like 10 weeks. I’m on the third week’s problem set now, and it has been months since I’ve started this program. I am just dragging behind, and I’d like to speed things up, but even if I dropped everything else, I still don’t think I’d be much quicker. As stupid as it must sound, I kind of feel like I actually need another class, maybe two. Some materials that focus more on the logic and problem solving skills related to the class would really help. All of this does reinforce the utility of my plan to do as much in a self-paced environment as I can. I have some subjects I’m quite good at… I presume, I haven’t really hit one yet, come to think of it. But the subjects I’m not great at are a lot easier to stomach when I don’t have extra stress from external deadlines or missed lectures bouncing around my head. It takes me for-fucking-ever to understand anything, so being able to take my time and really settle into a thought has so far been beneficial. However, I do feel I must challenge myself to increase the pace. Not only do I not, in actuality, have infinite time to do this, I’ve also done some of my best work under some stress and with pretty tight deadlines. Less room to either destructively ruminate or just straight-up slack off. So maybe I could do with a smidge more stress.
Lastly is the Stats class. The way the class is organized in the StraighterLine modules has been a little hard for me to get my head around. When you put things into neat little piles the way this program has, I am inclined to think these little piles are meant to be sifted through in a single session. But these sections are pretty damned long. Do I need to read faster? No, I can’t get myself stunlocked on that again. I read as fast as I read, and that’s just how it is.
That drawback aside, the way some of the individual lessons are structured does seem helpful. It feels like the authors read the same studies and advice on learning that I did, and they have the lessons laid out to pull from as much of that wisdom as they can. Like the end of almost every lesson does a summary of what was in it, and the beginning of almost every lesson has a recap on the last lesson. That’s pretty dope. But not everything works for me, like how every so often they try to introduce some mnemonic to help remember terms or sequences. These have basically never worked for me. I’m sure they work for most people, and them not working for me is just a “me” problem, but I get nothing from these. I think their effectiveness is a big part of that time that half the country lost their dang minds and got pretty angry with Science in general, all because Pluto got re-categorized. You guys, it’s a dead rock that too far away for you to ever even visit, why are you so pissed about this? Well, we all learned that our very educated mother something something pizzas, and if the pizzas ain’t there, then I’m not as smart as I think I am! Rah!
I do remember PEMDAS just fine, which I guess implies I actually can do that type of studying… but I’ve never really grasped why we’re excusing our Dear Aunt Sally or whatever. Also, some of these mnemonics are a real stretch, one I read today is something like “FUFFL”? Can’t be that, but you get the point. What am I suppose to do with FUFFL? Get stuffed.
What I’m hoping is that I’m on the wrong side of a learning curve. I don’t know if that’s actually a thing, but I remember times I’ve had it tough with learning before, and usually there had been a learning hilltop to crest. It’s a real hard climb to get up there, but once on top, the rest of the subject is riding the downhill. This isn’t to say easy, and especially not to say that it never gets tough again. But it’s like when you’re in hill country, cresting that first hill reveals all the other hills, which can be disheartening with the wrong attitude. However, if you know that field of hills is going to stretch out before you the second that crest the first one, you don’t see the field as a monster. You can start to plan how to crest each, and with each you work your way through, you get a little more capable. I’m really hoping something like that starts happening, ’cause I am feeling pretty weak right now.
Lastly I’ve been having more thoughts on how to organize all of this. One thing that really helped in my last job was organizing the work around the intended output. Like, some of the work, you just do. You know the work, you’ve been taught a few tasks, shown how to do it, and you’ve since done it a million times. You don’t even think about it, you just complete it, it’s whatever. Upload this, make that phone call, work out these numbers. But as the complexity of my work increased, more and more the pre-work would become a task unto itself – you’d need to spend time mapping out the work you needed to do before you could do the work itself. Sometimes I’d have to spend a few days or even a week just reading stuff to even get my head around what was being asked of me, what tools were available, or what types of solutions would be acceptable.
Should I have learned a lesson from that? Can I, should I organize my studies around the assignments? I have a bit of a distaste for the Self Help genre, but lately I’ve found myself reading a lot in that realm, particularly as it relates to learning. A common point of focus in those works is on autodidacts, and they imply that self-learners pick areas of study around one big idea they want to know, or a problem they want to solve, something they want to discover, or invention they’ve been trying to build. That’s kind of how I’m looking at the classes that I’m choosing, but maybe I need to extend this thought into the subject itself. Is that how that Stats class is organized? But the checkpoints only have three attempts… should I just plan to burn the first attempt on a likely failing grade? Dawg, I do kinda like that idea. Burn the first one to see just how far from the mark I am, gaining the knowledge of which areas need the most focus? Oh snap, that kinda sounds like something, doesn’t it? Hmm. Gotta sleep on that.
Oh! Last thought on the writing stuff. The course very much did offer a rubric, which I promptly ignored. I can, and will, at least partially blame this on the website’s presentation again. The page was all squished and you couldn’t scroll… I couldn’t read the dang thing! The results and feedback included a version that showed the rubric and my specific place in each measured area. It is also a lot more clear and I can actually read it now. So I’ll check that regularly, and see if I can find better versions of the rubric for future assignments.