My Health and Fitness update today is static. No real change. I suppose I could talk about my healthcare situation, but I really don’t know what it is just yet. I’m on Medicaid, which I think might really suck, but I guess I’ll find out soon.
Academically, I haven’t had much progress either. The decision I made at the end of last month to focus almost entirely on my English Comp I. turned out to be a good choice. So this month, I’ve decided to only spend time on my Stats and Computer Science stuff and nothing else.
I think I’m over the halfway point in my Stats class, but the way it’s stacked up and paced, I’m not really sure. I’m at least halfway, which is good. Wherever I am now, the difficulty curve has definitely increased. Not so much that I don’t think I can do it, I most definitely can, and will. But I need to spend more time actually working on it. The big thing I’m doing now in that class is splitting my time between revising previous lessons while trying to get my head around the next lessons. Revising, a term I’m borrowing from British student traditions (and am not sure I’m using correctly), is basically a targeted review of lessons, trying to figure out which areas I need work on, and then focusing on them. You know, when I actually state it this cleanly, it seems like a pretty obvious thing to do. But you know, it’s not something I’ve ever really done. Pair that with another thing that I’ve known about and often skipped is doing the actual reading. Especially in Math classes, I would just skip right over the reading, expecting to understand the material from the lecture, which I likely also didn’t pay attention to. I mean, there was a time when that did work for me, and then I’d have a bunch of time to play or slack off, so you can see how I got into this pattern. It’s kinda wild how hard it is to develop this habit as an adult, but this, too, is possible.
Anyway, that’s working, but I continue to feel pretty slow at it all. It’s been about four months, maybe more, since I started this Stats class, which I’m pretty sure is longer than a traditional, in person class. I don’t know if this bit of knowledge encourages or deters me from enrolling in an in person class, but it definitely has me feeling a way.
Likewise, I’m way behind on that CS50, which I know I’ve mentioned before. Probably a couple of times, really. I think this is similar, but it took me months to even figure out that there were other materials, or to internalize lessons of process. I’m still working on process, to be honest. One of the books I’m reading now is about that exactly, trying to develop an ongoing framework for problem solving. Developing that skill makes me wonder how I ever got anything done in my life before.
So CS50 is broken up into 10 weeks. Is a semester really just 12 weeks? Fuck, man, that hits hard. Anyway, each week has a core lecture, some additional lectures or short reviews, a few practice problems, and at least one but perhaps several assignments to actually turn in. Except for the last week, which I think might just be the lecture and final project, though I’ll be sure to check before getting myself in too deep. It took me way too many weeks into this project to learn that there was so much help to go off of – I really just thought it was the lecture and the assignments. Given that this started with the programming language C and I also thought that I couldn’t find any help elsewhere, it’s no wonder that it’s been taking me so long. It wasn’t until near the end of my work on Week 6 that I learned there was even more available in the form of notes from the lectures, all of which highlight the most important parts of the lessons and some seem to actually add in more information. I keep expecting to stumble upon even more reading that I’ve missed, which would really help tie this whole thing together, but I haven’t yet.
I’m on Week 8, which is all web stuff – html, css, and javascript. I have had experience with each, but very limited. This week only had one practice problem, which I did work on but slacked a bit on. It was good practice, and if I had more time, I might enjoy luxuriating on it. But I really wanted to get moving on the actual assignments, so I didn’t linger. I moved onto the assignments, of which there are two of for this week, pretty quickly. The first was easy enough, though did also take me some time. I’ve found myself a bit stuck on the second problem, which is to create your own website. I’ve found myself stuck on this problem, not because I’m not capable of doing it or that any particular things escapes me, although there are a few elements I’ve considered including that are rather ambitious for a simple school project. Rather, I find myself mired in the ideation phase. I’ve landed on the idea of redesigning one of my actual, existing websites, possibly this one, though I’m currently leaning on fixing up cookiesandramen.com, which is extremely busted on mobile. But whichever I go with, I can’t seem to settle on a design. The good news is that this has given me quick a fair bit of practice with html and css, and I think I’m finally getting the hang of them both. The downside is that I keep landing on designs that would take way too much effort, and I haven’t put in any practice on javascript, which is required to pass. I don’t even know what I’m going to do with it, though I suppose I can do as it seems most other students do, and lean on the crutch of having javascript handle the contact page.
As an additional positive, I think I already know what my final project is going to be. Though come to think of it, I don’t know what the actual parameters of that project are… maybe I should give that a preview before I get locked in.
I should post some of my process stuff up here at some point. That’d be fun, right?
I don’t know, it’s late and I’m tired, so I’m gunna wrap it for today. Keep it real, but not too real.