February Goal Summary

Today’s the end of February. I’ll be spending most of the day working on my final paper for my class, but I’m confident that I can write it quickly. For once, I’m more concerned that I will have to trim my writing rather than expand it.

Looking back over my habits, I accomplished them for the following number of days out of 29 days in February:
Bible reading/prayer: 13
Exercise: 10
Cleaning: 9
Schoolwork: 18
Reading: 12
Programming: 10
Japanese: 17
Writing: 16
Bible memory: 7 out of 10 days since I started
No video games: 16
No fanfiction: 24

Obviously my eleven-day video game binge really put a hole in the month’s progress. As I said before, I need to find a rescue mechanism in the case that a reiteration appears to be imminent. Even so, I don’t feel like I did too badly. Ten days of exercise is one day in three, which is kind of my baseline goal. I’m quite satisfied to have averaged writing every other day. I was surprised to see that I only read 12 days total because it felt like more, but looking back it seems that my memory might be incorporating January, in which I read 24/31 days. Wow, that was a lot.

JAPANESE
I have learned 94 words, so I’ve averaged over three words a day. That’s not too bad, especially considering I slacked off for almost half of that time. I think I will continue this goal in March, though I will be less strict about finding six or seven words every day—the difficulty became a little intimidating after a few unsuccessful days.

I also wrote six sentences in Japanese—far below my goal. Rather than feeling motivated to try again, however, I think I’m ready to give up production. Anyway, while I may use a bit of Japanese in the days to come, it’s looking like even the drinking party which was my strongest source of motivation might be canceled. On a related note, I finished a fanfiction yesterday that was nearly 600k words. The author claims that English is not his first (or even second) language, and yet as far as I can tell he uses it just as well if not better than a native speaker, and he uses many English words that I’m not familiar with—lucubration, for instance. I think that’s amazing and I would love to be able to do the same, but right now I don’t have the drive.

Instead, I’ve decided to return to the reasons that I wanted to learn Japanese in the first place, as these are most likely to motivate me even after I leave Japan. First, I wanted to learn kanji. As of now, I have familiarity with all the general-use kanji, and if I see a kanji I don’t know I can almost always identify its parts so that I can look it up. I would like to be more comfortable with writing, so I might later set up a short routine of writing a certain number of kanji every day, but on the whole I feel that I have satisfied my goal in this area. My other aim was to be able to read visual novels, especially ones that aren’t available in English. My drive to play these games has dimmed along with my youth (hah), but is not yet extinguished. Thus, my goal for March will be to read a visual novel for at least 15 minutes every day.

5-MINUTE PLANK
I didn’t do any planks between Tuesday morning and Friday night, when I barely did 2:15. I made it to 2:40 this morning, but it was painful. At night, my minimum goal was 2:20, and once again it took a lot of effort just to make it that far. I did a lot of sit-ups during my work-out, which I blame partially for the difficulty.
I suspect that two minutes of the plank will take a while to build up to. Truly though, I enjoy planking because I always feel like I’ve accomplished something and I can do something else during the few minutes it takes. I think I will extend my five-minute plank goal to the end of March, but for better accountability I’ll also say that I want to be able to do 3:30 by March 8, 4:00 by March 15, 4:30 by March 21, and 4:45 by March 28.

DANCING
No progress since last post.

PROGRAMMING
No progress since last post.

BIBLE MEMORY
I think I reached my goal of at least 90% accuracy for Psalms 1-10. I’ve been using scripturetyper to review verses, which is convenient but has several attributes which make the statistics it reports inaccurate. Until I get my program running, though, it’s the best tool that I have, and according to it, my goal was achieved. Looking back, this goal was a bit too modest. I neglected practicing for three days this week, and still felt quite confident about meeting the goal.

There are 121 verses in Psalms 1-10, and I had ten days to review (though I only used seven). I think my next goal will be In Psalms 11-25, in which there are 214 verses. Although I’ll have triple the number of days for fewer than double the verses, I’m also sure that I don’t remember these verses nearly as well. In fact, when I did a quick test of Psalm 25, nothing even came to mind, as if I was trying to memorize it for the first time. So I think this will be a challenge. To make sure that it isn’t too easy though, I’m going to go through all the Psalms in the first ten days, and do a test on March 15. If I can remember at least 90% of at least 160 verses, then I’ll add to my goal.

RUBIK’S CUBE
I skipped practice from Tuesday to Thursday. I realized this morning that I can do F2L with very little backtracking, though my methods are not always most efficient. For this week then (through March 7th), I have two goals. First, learn the last 2 PLL algorithms (I’ve forgotten one since I first learned it), practicing the patterns 20 times a day and identification and use 5 times a day. That might sound like a lot, but the pattern only takes a few seconds, so all of this shouldn’t take more than ten minutes total. My second goal is to go through every possible F2L case, examining my intuitive solving and comparing it with the ideal solution to see if learning the algorithm makes a significant difference.

Fanfiction and Corona

On Monday I felt absolutely on top of the world. On Tuesday, I felt close to miserable, particularly in the afternoon. I was sneezing a lot and having to blow my nose every ten minutes. I went to the supermarket and bought some allergy medicine, which I took before bedtime, but I really didn’t feel like doing anything. Even when I tried solving a Rubik’s cube, I made several mistakes and got frustrated. I tried to find a book to replace the one that I finished on Monday night, about four kings of the renaissance, but I couldn’t find anything that piqued my interest. So, I ended up reading fanfiction on Tuesday, about Harry Potter in the world of Lord of the Rings. It was good, but had an unsatisfactory ending in which Harry was transported to another dimension, and it implied that he might not return for a long time if ever.

After taking the medicine I slept better and felt fine on Wednesday, so I guess it really was allergies in February. I got a little bit of schoolwork done at work, but I also found another fanfiction which I have continued to read in my free time since then, replacing all my good habits with one that I’ve been trying to eliminate. Of course, that has only really totaled three days, but since my final paper is due this week and I will do a monthly report this weekend, it’s not a very nice end to the month.

For some reason I decided that I was not going to cook at all this week, and have been eating convenience store food instead. That might be bad in America, but I live close to a nice convenience store with fresh food, kind of like a Sheetz, but the food is stir-fry bowls instead of sandwiches. A couple of my coworkers have only eat from convenience stores for over a year, so I don’t feel like a week will be too bad for me. Still, after this week I think and hope that I will be excited to return to cooking.

The panic over the corona virus has increased steadily. I wasn’t really worried about it until on Tuesday I heard that someone in Matsumoto had the virus. On Thursday there was an announcement in the school that if anyone in the Shiojiri school system caught the virus, all the schools in the city would immediately close for at least fourteen days. Furthermore, the long graduation ceremony at the end of the term would be shortened to only 15 minutes, and the participants reduced to the graduating class, their parents, and the teachers. Then yesterday the prime minister of Japan made an order to shut down schools until the end of spring break. Nagano prefecture apparently wasn’t addressed immediately in this order, but the situation is still developing. Before my third period class, I was told that we would indeed stop classes until spring break. That means that I won’t be able to see my students again. I’m still sorting out my feelings about this, but I’m definitely feeling loss.

Third day of a three-day weekend

I’m not sure that I’ve had a more productive third day of a three-day weekend in the entire time that I’ve lived in Japan. As usual I felt the call of video games, and I did look for and play an idle game, but it is so necessarily idle that I doubt I spent more than an hour on it all day. I had planned to try pre-packing, but I didn’t really feel motivated on Sunday, and I completely forgot yesterday. I don’t think it will be necessary. I made some progress on the final paper for my class--not as much as I had hoped, but I feel satisfied.

JAPANESE

Since I had some time, I did my reading in Steins;Gate, the visual novel that I’ve been trying to read for the past two years. It took me a solid twenty minutes of reading to find six words that I wasn’t confident in my understanding and weren’t too niche. Even then, the words were a bit technical—for example: compression, drainage, interference. One example of a word that I felt was too niche was the Japanese translation of the large Hadron collider. Yeah, I don’t plan on using that in communication any time soon.

I still didn’t do any writing in Japanese, but I still intend to try.

5-MINUTE PLANK

In the morning I barely made it to 2:15. In the evening I pushed myself for the last thirty seconds to make 3:00. It was really tough, but I feel like my back and stomach are getting stronger even if it doesn’t necessarily show in my times.

DANCING

I learned a basic but nice new move yesterday, but found that it looks better slow than fast, or maybe I just can’t do it properly when going fast.

Though I decided on a song to choreograph on Sunday, I found a shorter one with about the same tempo (and as a bonus, in French!) yesterday, so I decided to go with it instead. My next step will be to figure out which of the dance moves that I know and can do in my apartment setting are tempo appropriate. Once I make that list, I’ll match sections of the song to those moves, and finally I’ll work on making smooth transitions between them.

PROGRAMMING

I still didn’t do any actual programming, but I finally added some things to the project management website. It’s really cool. I wrote features I wanted to add as tasks, and then for the most crucial one I broke down the task into subtasks, then because I had some decisions to make, I brainstormed some possible solutions on the website, where it was recorded so that I can see it in the future. So I didn’t really do anything, but I feel better about it and more prepared to work on it soon.

BIBLE MEMORY

I reviewed a few Psalms, including Psalm 9, which was still difficult but I (barely) managed to do with 90% accuracy. I also read and then reviewed Psalm 10. I missed a couple of verses, but it wasn’t as bad as Psalm 9. I think if I review all 10 of the Psalms twice between today and Friday, I will have no problem recalling them to satisfaction on Saturday, my goal date.

RUBIK’S CUBE

I was much more disciplined about counting moves, and though I had a couple of times where my mind blanked and I got a really high number of moves, in general I felt like the solutions were coming more easily. When I did my night plank, I also solved the Rubik’s cube using F2L, and did it in just over two minutes.

Lost backpack

On the way back from a little afternoon shopping trip, I got off the train at my home station and took about five steps before realizing that my backpack was gone. It didn’t have anything particularly valuable in it, but it did contain my shopping harvest and it’s a good backpack. So I turned around and jumped back on the train just before the doors closed. My backpack wasn’t there, so it had to be back at the station where I had gotten on the train, but I was currently on a train heading in the opposite direction, to a station where sometimes there are no trains for an hour or more. I was very fortunate this time though—I arrived at the station two minutes before a train that was going back in the direction from which I came. I rode this train all the way back to the shopping station and found my backpack sitting on a chair exactly as I had left it. I caught the next train back home, only having lost an hour in total.

JAPANESE

I endured an article about the corona virus and mined my vocabulary words. Nothing came to mind for writing. From today I will start writing my big paper which will include a lot of review of the concepts that I have learned, so I hope that I will be able to use what I am thinking about in that assignment.

5-MINUTE PLANK

Yesterday morning I just barely held out for 2:18. At night though, I made it to 3:00 and the alarm still wasn’t ringing too loudly—I might have been able to keep going. I suspect that caffeine might be detrimental to my endurance, so on Tuesday I’ll try doing it before breakfast.

DANCING

I danced for the first time in two weeks on Friday, and on Saturday I did squats until I got tired—usually I just do them until I get bored, which actually takes less time. On Sunday I learned that doing that many squats makes me very sore. I decided to count my walking (about thirty minutes) and bike riding (15 minutes) as my exercise.

PROGRAMMING

No progress.

BIBLE MEMORY

On Saturday I struggled with Psalm 7, but on Sunday it came to me easily and almost without errors. Psalm 8 I made it through without too many errors despite not reviewing it. Psalm 9 is the longest of the first ten Psalms at 20 verses. I read them first, but even after immediately trying to review I had a lot of trouble, as expected. Still, I think my original goal is doable.

RUBIK’S CUBE

I got a lot of practice in while I was on or waiting for the train. It was difficult to make the disciplined act of counting my moves for F2L, though. I only recorded three tries, 53, 29, and 53. Obviously the middle one was very lucky. I’ll try to do better today and record at least five.

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.

The Last of the Elysian Empire

I managed to avoid video games for the past two days, but I had a craving when I woke up this morning, and after a couple of hours of productivity I succumbed to it. I played for two hours and finally reached the goal that I had had since the beginning of the game, only to discover no sense of satisfaction upon reaching it and that the next goal was equally as immense and tedious. I quit and uninstalled the game.

The module for school this week was about learners with exceptionalities. In the textbook I encountered a very thought-provoking quote, which defined intelligence as “the ability to get what you want out of life by purposefully using your strengths to compensate for your weaknesses.” This parallels what I saw in the blog that I mentioned a few days ago, about learning new skills. I have had many, many goals in my life, but I have often looked at my failures or progress relative to these goals and given up. This also explains some of the appeal of video games—I make goals and usually I can make consistent and visual progress toward those goals. In some games progress be lost—I hate that so much that I restart or cheat, and if I can’t do that I will give up on the game, just like I give up in real life when faced with setbacks or lack of progress. The blogger I mentioned sets the example of examining these obstacles and considering how to overcome them. I’m sure for most of my life I would have said that this is a great skill, but only because I’ve seen how to do it laid out so clearly do I believe that I can do likewise.

Right now I’m working on some skills, but there are a lot more that I’d like to learn in the future. In addition to language learning, I’d like to learn how to talk to people, how to ask questions of anyone, pottery (more), ballroom dance (more), cooking (more), sewing, carpentry, farming, how to sing better, write fiction, write poetry, speak in different accents with consistency, play violin and piano, and many other skills that I may not have even encountered yet. For now, though, I’m experimenting with this way of living to see if I can apply it to this variety of areas.

Youtube has had a lot of ads for something called Master Class lately, where you take an online class with someone who is famous in their field. I’m skeptical of this because an expert (especially a popular one) doesn’t always make a good teacher, and it doesn’t help that most of the topics they advertise are trendy, plus they’re not usually interesting to me. But today I saw an ad for creative writing with Neil Gaiman, and he basically said that writing a rough draft is like driving through the fog, and writing a second draft is trying to make it seem like you knew what you were doing all along. That was very encouraging to me. Although I don’t find Neil Gaiman’s novels particularly cohesive, Faulkner said something that wasn’t dissimilar. After my last attempt to write a novel (I think it was in 2014), I had more or less told myself that I didn’t have the talent for it and I should just give up. I wouldn’t consider writing to be a strong desire of mine at the moment, but it is undeniably something that I have wanted to do since I was very young, and I think it’s something worthwhile, too.

Yesterday, I read about decision fatigue. I suspect that I’m more susceptible to it than most people because I put so much effort in every decision, but instead of making poor decisions (though I do that too), I usually just put off decisions when I get tired. This might even explain why I have so much trouble corresponding with people, and writing in general.

JAPANESE

知能というのは、長所が短所を補って生活の中で欲しいものを得る方法を見つける能力です。なお、知能がある人はほとんど他の人より強くて、大きくて、モテルひとです。

Yesterday, I wrote this translation of the two impressive points that I learned this week in school. I’m not sure what today’s text is going to be yet. To mine my vocabulary words, I just read a whole bunch of newspaper headlines, not seeing anything interesting enough to seem worth reading. Almost all of the articles were about the corona virus, which I don’t want to read about anymore. I might have to look for a new source of reading material.

5-MINUTE PLANK

Yesterday I did three plank sessions. The first two lasted 1:40, and in the last I held out for 1:45, which means that according to the original challenger’s definition I have passed this challenge. Still, I do want to see if it’s possible to hold a plank five minutes continuously, so I’m going to try for longer sessions from today. Counting today I have eight days left in the challenge, so I’m going to try to add 20 seconds each day, starting with 2:40 from today. In my first session this morning, I only managed 2:30.

DANCING

I started dancing for exercise over four years ago. In this time, I’ve learned a lot about dance styles, and I’ve learned a couple of neat moves. For the most part though, I look like an amateur who learned a few basic moves but doesn’t know how to use them well. My progress is depressing. Last night I got discouraged again, and I wanted to stop just twenty minutes into my session. Fatigue might have played a part in that too, and I’m also annoyed that I have to work so hard to avoid making the building shake. Plus, so many of my moves didn’t feel rhythmically appropriate for the music I was listening to.

PROGRAMMING

I had enough time to work on my program, but I felt a little overwhelmed by how much I had to do. I also felt lacking in confidence in my ability to correct bugs and implement features that can be used intuitively. I’ve got some steps broken down, but I think I can reduce them further into manageable tasks which will hopefully be less daunting.

BIBLE MEMORY

I reviewed Psalms 6 and 7 today. 7 is long and was originally rather difficult to memorize, and I found my memory of the middle section quite shaky. Even so, I think with a few days of review it will come back to me.

RUBIK’S CUBE

I’m adding this to the list—my goal will be to average under 40 seconds by the end of March. This is a mostly useless skill, but I’ve found that it helps me concentrate on other work and gives me a nice short break when I need it. Plus, I think it’s very easy to see progress with a Rubik’s cube because it’s such a physical activity, so I’m using it to test out this method of learning skills and, if it works, use my success as to encourage my learning of other skills. I mentioned earlier this week that my current solving average (as long as I don’t make mistakes) is about 70 seconds. I’ve since been learning some algorithms that should make my time faster in the long run, but so far it has only made my mistakes more frequent. I have one more PLL (fourth and final step) algorithm to learn, and then I’ll practice these algorithms and recognizing when to use them. I’m hoping I’ll be able to use these algorithms correctly (even if not speedily) by the end of February. From March, I plan to work on F2L, the second step, which is supposed to be done intuitively, and therefore will be the most difficult and require the most practice. Once I use this method consistently, I’ll start working on OLL algorithms, the third step. I’ve spent most of February working on my first step, so I think it’s doing a lot better than the rest.

One important thing that I need to remember in practicing this (and other skills as well) is that I need to be intentional. I’m really bad about this when I practice instruments, as I much prefer to play the whole song rather than practice short, problematic passages. The past few weeks with the Rubik’s cube has been mostly the same way—I solve it from start to finish instead of working on my weaknesses in each step. To discourage myself from doing this, I’m going to say that I can only record (time) two solves a day, and all my other plays must be paying attention to individual steps. I hope this won’t take the fun out of it.

x

Back to improvement

Yesterday was my first day back on my normal schedule, but I prioritized schoolwork so I didn’t do exercise and cleaning. I got my schoolwork finished just after eight, so I actually had time to exercise (and probably should have done so), but by skipping I wasn’t stressed. I had planned to get back on schedule on Tuesday or Wednesday, but on Tuesday I ended up continuing my game as the Elysian Empire and at the end of the day my goal was still not in sight. So, I played on Wednesday as well. At this point, I just got tired of conquering, waiting for assimilation to happen and peace treaties to expire, then repeating. For me the game’s draw is the imaginative potential combined with the visual progress, but if I don’t invest in the imaginative aspect, it gets quite dull.

Reflection is an important skill, and one that I am seeking to improve through writing regularly. I hope it will also motivate me toward achievement. With that in mind, I will now reflect on my short-term goals and their progress.

JAPANESE

On Tuesday, I did some reading from the local newspaper and was impressed at how few words were unfamiliar to me. Even so, I had difficulty assembling the words into meaning. So just now, I had an idea about how to improve reading comprehension. Instead of answering questions, what if I try to write summaries of articles that I read? The summaries would be in English, so they shouldn’t be difficult, but it should press me to work harder at comprehending texts. I’ll think about it.

Yesterday I picked up a book at the elementary school and read a couple of pages, and enjoyed it. I think it would be great if I went to the library (almost) every day and tried reading children’s books. I’m afraid, however, that doing so would make exercise more difficult, because it would have to be straight after work and then my dinner would be later and I don’t like to exercise on a full stomach, and I’m afraid that exercising after 8:30 will disturb my neighbors. The reasonable alternative would be to borrow books from the library, and I have no excuse not to do this except that I don’t know how and learning to do so would probably involve talking to people. Once again, I’ll think about it. Although I think reading the newspaper is helpful, I don’t think it’s the most efficient method to improve, nor the most enjoyable, so I worry that I won’t be able to sustain this habit.

I was reminded that my Japanese study doesn’t have a firm goal, and though I wrote in my last entry that I would think and make a plan by today, I haven’t thought about it at all. Writing summaries might be a good goal, but it would be foolish not to take advantage of the potential production opportunities available now for a limited time. What’s the problem with production? I have no motivation. Is there any production that I would be motivated to do? I am motivated to talk with Japanese teachers (who talk to me), especially at the upcoming end of year parties. However, I don’t feel that I can prepare for this in any effective capacity. So I can’t think of production that I want to do off the top of my head. I’ll brainstorm some possibilities:

Blogging

Speech

Video

Journaling

Creative writing

Summarizing a text

Blogging sounds nice, but given how much difficulty I’ve had with it before, I don’t think it’s a viable option at this point. Honestly, my favorite option might be my idea of summarizing a text. I could do it in English and then sort of translate that summary back to Japanese while referring to the original text. Hopefully this will give me practice on the most mechanical parts of writing, and once I’m comfortable with that I can move on to more creative writing like blogging. The next question is—am I interested enough in newspapers to do this? Are there other options? NHK has a lot of articles, but recently I’ve wasted some time scrolling through them trying to find something interesting.

Another idea that just occurred to me—what if I talk about education? I can use it to consolidate the learning I’m doing in my classes, and maybe I can use it to discuss with teachers, too. It might not be as useful a topic when I return to the states, since I doubt that Japanese students will be studying education at an American university, but that’s something to worry about later.

I think I’ll use both methods, but prioritize education because it’s more likely to be useful in the present, and summarize newspaper articles when I can’t think of anything else. My goal for this next week will be to write at least two sentences every day in Japanese summarizing something that I’ve learned in the most recent module of class. I will have the Japanese checked by someone. If I don’t feel like doing this, I’ll summarize an article from Japanese (with a 3-sentence minimum), and the next day I’ll translate my summary back into Japanese.

5-MINUTE PLANK

The person who inspired this goal considered it accomplished when, on the thirtieth day of her challenge, her combined planking time over multiple planking sessions and different planking positions equaled five minutes. I think that’s cheating, and I think if I tried, I could probably succeed at that standard today or tomorrow. When I measured my baseline plank on Monday, I held it for 2 minutes. On Tuesday, I held it for 2:10. On Thursday I did two sessions of two minutes each. This morning I held it for 1:40 but couldn’t hold it any longer. I’m not seeing any immediate progress, and since I only have nine days left in the challenge I’m not confident that I will be able to more than double my current record, but I’m still going to try.

DANCING

No progress for the past two weeks. I really wanted to dance yesterday though—I was dancing at school and in the supermarket. I plan to get back to it today.

PROGRAMMING

I worked on my program a little last night. I encountered a very strange bug when it corrected my typing mistakes, and I’m not sure how to reproduce that condition. I also decided that I would much prefer that my correct percentage depend on my incorrect words rather than characters. So I have a lot of work to do on that.

BIBLE MEMORY

On Tuesday, I wrote out Psalm 1 entirely from memory with only a few mistakes, which I attribute to having learned this verse in at least two versions which causes some interference. Yesterday I wrote out Psalms 2-5 as well. The first two only required prompting in a few areas, but the latter two were more forgotten than remembered. The first ten Psalms might be more of a stretch than I had thought, especially since I remember nine and ten being long and quite difficult to memorize. My more modest goal is the first eight Psalms, but I think I still have a chance at ten so I’ll keep writing them out and start reviewing the completed verses every day.

CONCLUSION

Having written out these reflections, I note that with planking and Bible memory I focus more on the goal than on the means to achieve it. Maybe this is okay for a first time reflection, but I hope that in general my reflections will concern my processes rather than the goals.