Reevaluating difficult assignments

I really struggled with my schoolwork this past week. I think it was a combination of a strange new (and intimidatingly important) assignment, the frustration of not having decent examples, and a feeling of incompetence—that I didn’t have the needed experience to do a good job. I did break the tasks down well, but in the end, it didn’t help me a whole lot. Maybe there were too many tasks, or maybe I could do a better job of making the tasks objective. I did spend plenty of time on schoolwork, but it wasn’t sufficient. Yesterday I decided that I should have emailed the professor for some guidance about one section in particular, but with less than 8 hours to go before the deadline, it was really too late.

Strategies to improve this: work ahead. Write particular actions that I can do. And if I’m stuck, look at the sample and adapt it as much as possible. I also think I did too much work on the planning, which made me panic when I looked at how much I had to write. There were several sections that were mostly independent, which I could have written days before. So: identify isolated parts that I might be able to complete without feeling the weight of the whole assignment on its quality and do them first.

I finally got tired of fanfiction and decided to download a Shakespeare app and attempt reading through the works of Shakespeare again. I might maintain my progress here, since it feels like too much of a hassle to update my book blog independently.

SCHOOLWORK:
It’s a new week, the last one in the semester, and the assignments have to be done by Friday. I feel pretty good about getting them done, though—the expectations are clear, I have multiple examples of the difficult assignment, and for the other big assignment I’m already half done with the planning.

JOB:
I applied to the educational technology place, even though I wasn’t completely happy with my cover letter. I updated my resume and LinkedIn profile. I hope to be able to have a website before I apply anywhere else. I’m going to talk with Dad about my branding worksheet today, I hope.

EXERCISE:
No cardio recently, but I did a lot of pushups, planks, and bicep curls over the weekend. I’m not sure that I’m doing some of the tripod plank exercises correctly—one arm and one leg planks sometimes don’t seem to be as difficult as they should.

SPANISH:
I finished unit three with comparatives and superlatives, but no podcast since Friday means that the Spanish hasn’t been floating around in my head.

DIY:
No progress. I will start attaching pieces today, I hope.

PROGRAMMING:
I designed the visual forms of my Foodmaster program, then I was inspired to write a javascript idle program (see last post). At the moment it has a progress bar that increases upon a button click. That’s about it, and it’s rather ugly too.

BIBLE MEMORY:
Up to Psalm 25:11, halfway finished. Like I said, it’s more difficult than expected, but I do really love this Psalm.

BIBLE READING AND PRAYER:
Not so good on the prayer, but I haven’t skipped reading in the past four days. There were several thought-provoking passages in today’s reading. I’m feeling too impatient to write much about them, but one was Luke 8:10 “To you it has been granted to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God, but to the rest it is in parables, so that SEEING THEY MAY NOT SEE, AND HEARING THEY MAY NOT UNDERSTAND.” This is a reference to Isaiah 6:9-10, and it’s very interesting.