New Mindset

For the last forty-eight hours or so, I’ve been monitoring my thoughts more carefully than usual, and filtering them through my new mindset, of “what can I try that might work” instead of “what can I do that should work.” I’ve found that I have a very pessimistic and/or fatalistic view of a lot of things. Just now I was thinking about differentiating instruction for learners with special needs, and how difficult it would be to make special roles for every group assignment for every such learner in a class. Surely you would burn out quickly! But then my new mindset kicked in and proposed “maybe you could identify a common factor in each assignment that would suit these learners. If you did that, it would hardly be any extra effort at all!”

Another example: I struggle tremendously with responding to forum posts of my classmates. So I decided that I need to make a systematic approach to this, instead of spending hours staring at a blank page. Here it is:

1. I read the post for the first time, immediately jotting down any ideas as they come to me. As soon as I’ve finished reading, I try to convert these ideas into coherent sentences.

2. I reread the post, making bullet point summaries of a few words for each point that the author makes or for each topic they address. Again, if any new ideas come to me, I immediately write them down.

3. I set a timer and spend at least fifteen seconds on each bullet point, trying to make connections or extensions from the author’s ideas to my own or others that I’ve encountered.

4. I go through the points again, this time thinking about any relevant personal experiences I have had.

5. I go through the points again, trying to remember pertinent Bible verses or passages.

6. I go through the points one last time, trying to think of questions that I could ask.

7. I sleep on it, then repeat steps 3-6, referring back to the original text when my summaries are too opaque.

With this painstaking method I managed to complete my schoolwork without the crunch of last minute panic.

JAPANESE

Most of my Japanese studying was already mentioned yesterday—I read headlines and found new vocabulary. I wanted to write sentences, but nothing came immediately to mind, and I ended up running out of time because I was trying to finish my schoolwork first.

5-MINUTE PLANK

At around 2 minutes I seem to hear an alarm that says “COLLAPSE IMMINENT, PREPARE FOR LANDING.” On my longest plank of 2:30, I managed to hold out against this for another fifteen seconds, but as I start shaking and feel my form crumple, it is difficult to justify holding myself up. Five minutes doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen in a systematic way, if at all. I’ll keep trying to hold out as long as possible, though, and we’ll see how close I get.

DANCING

I learned a cool new move called the pivoting pas-de-bourée. It’s easy to use, suits my style, and I think it looks good—I did it for about half of my dancing session yesterday. I have also tentatively chosen the song I want to choreograph. At around 3:50, it’s much longer than I wanted to do, but it’s one of those songs that gives me a lot of dancing energy.

PROGRAMMING

With the intention of breaking my project down into more manageable steps, I registered for a project management website. Unfortunately the website is a little complicated, so I still haven’t even started working on this.

BIBLE MEMORY

I wrote about it yesterday, and I haven’t worked on it today yet. I need to be more consistent with which day I write about. o_o

RUBIK’S CUBE

After my post yesterday, I immediately changed my strategy. Daunted by the mystery of F2L which I had had no success with in the few times I tried it, I set out to get a better grasp on it. For some reason it took a lot of willpower to suffer through a five-minute explanation on Youtube, but this gave me a foundation. I used references for cases whose solutions weren’t immediately apparent even after my training, but little by little I relied less on these references. F2L is a lot of fun, actually, even more fun than using algorithms to go fast. My last three F2L solves haven’t referred to the internet at all, and I did them without stumbling around too much. For the rest of the month I think I’ll count the number of moves I take to solve F2L with the aim of reducing them, including rotations of the whole cube, because that costs even more time than spinning a section of the cube.