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December 4: your feelings about returning to college (for Mom) [Tumblr crosspost]
Mixed. Very mixed.
My first attempt (attempts?) at college was not a good time in my life in many ways. In retrospect, I am fairly sure I was already suffering from periodic clinical depression in high school, but the symptoms were masked by circumstance: namely, I was surrounded daily by family and/or friends I'd known for years, who tended to pull and push me into more or less keeping on top of my life even when my brain was on strike. I didn't have that support system at Cornell, and it's very easy to fall through the cracks at a large university. Which I did.
So returning to college, in any form, was always going to dredge up a lot of negative associations. I still find myself being avoidant about signing onto the online classroom system sometimes, and have to give myself a metaphorical shake by the scruff of the neck until I work through that.
On the other hand, this is something I'm doing by and for myself, and there's a sense of accomplishment in just having applied and registered and so on, since I avoided doing even that much for years. And I like learning, plus writing essays is a good way to reinforce stuff that I've read -- explaining things to other people helps solidify one's own ideas and understanding -- so those parts are fun, if occasionally a bit tedious.
It's been interesting finding my feet in an online learning environment. I think in some ways I would have done better in a physical classroom; that would have put more structure on my life, which would have been helpful since I'm bad at time-management outside of a work environment. On the other hand, the flexibility is nice...
I've discovered that I am bad at reading textbooks in my own apartment; I get distracted far too easily. During the first module of the course, I wound up doing a bunch of my reading at the grocery store. I would literally drive there to go shopping, buy a slice of pizza at the takeout counter, and sit and read about economic history for an hour, surrounded by canned pop music and store announcements. It was ridiculous. So for the second module, I've started carting my textbooks to the public library and getting my reading done there, which has been working nicely.
I don't think I'm going to do excellently in this class -- middling to good seems to be where I'm headed, since I was awfully wobbly in the first module -- but I've officially cut myself some slack on that front. I am taking this course to re-teach myself how to be a student as much as to learn the actual subject material. (Though I am definitely keeping three of the textbooks, because you never know when things will come in handy as background material for fiction.)
Next semester, I will be more confident in what I'm doing, and will push myself for better grades. :-)
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December Talking Meme: All Days
Mixed. Very mixed.
My first attempt (attempts?) at college was not a good time in my life in many ways. In retrospect, I am fairly sure I was already suffering from periodic clinical depression in high school, but the symptoms were masked by circumstance: namely, I was surrounded daily by family and/or friends I'd known for years, who tended to pull and push me into more or less keeping on top of my life even when my brain was on strike. I didn't have that support system at Cornell, and it's very easy to fall through the cracks at a large university. Which I did.
So returning to college, in any form, was always going to dredge up a lot of negative associations. I still find myself being avoidant about signing onto the online classroom system sometimes, and have to give myself a metaphorical shake by the scruff of the neck until I work through that.
On the other hand, this is something I'm doing by and for myself, and there's a sense of accomplishment in just having applied and registered and so on, since I avoided doing even that much for years. And I like learning, plus writing essays is a good way to reinforce stuff that I've read -- explaining things to other people helps solidify one's own ideas and understanding -- so those parts are fun, if occasionally a bit tedious.
It's been interesting finding my feet in an online learning environment. I think in some ways I would have done better in a physical classroom; that would have put more structure on my life, which would have been helpful since I'm bad at time-management outside of a work environment. On the other hand, the flexibility is nice...
I've discovered that I am bad at reading textbooks in my own apartment; I get distracted far too easily. During the first module of the course, I wound up doing a bunch of my reading at the grocery store. I would literally drive there to go shopping, buy a slice of pizza at the takeout counter, and sit and read about economic history for an hour, surrounded by canned pop music and store announcements. It was ridiculous. So for the second module, I've started carting my textbooks to the public library and getting my reading done there, which has been working nicely.
I don't think I'm going to do excellently in this class -- middling to good seems to be where I'm headed, since I was awfully wobbly in the first module -- but I've officially cut myself some slack on that front. I am taking this course to re-teach myself how to be a student as much as to learn the actual subject material. (Though I am definitely keeping three of the textbooks, because you never know when things will come in handy as background material for fiction.)
Next semester, I will be more confident in what I'm doing, and will push myself for better grades. :-)
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December Talking Meme: All Days
