A Last-Ditch Effort!
Okay, so I haven't been nearly as good about keeping up with the blog as I should be. There's actually a reason for that (beyond laziness, which I assure you is not the issue here), and I think for a finale, that's a damn good start.
1. I hate journals. No, really, I do. I've never been good with them. I've had to keep them for several classes, and I always...ALWAYS...fall behind. Mainly, I just don't feel like writing constantly. I don't particularly write for fun, and I don't particularly feel like I have anything clever or amusing to write.
Now, you'll note the 1. That logically suggests that there's a 2. There is. I figure for the rest of this "Dear God Dr. Rogers Don't Flunk Me I'm Not A Lazy Useless Slug I Promise!" post, I'll just do a reflection on this class, this semester, and my job over that time period. That all will make clear what my #2 is for not keeping up with the blog.
This semester started off beautifully for me. Classes went well, I learned new things, etc. etc. and all that funky jazz. That part, I'm pretty sure, can be left to a "fill in the blank" approach. I had issues, and lots of them, with wrapping my head around the reading responses. They required brevity and directness, two things that I'm particularly un-good at. As a matter of fact, if there was anything that I was un-goodest at, brevity, directness, and math would be waging a three-way war, winner take all, for that honor.
For some reason I just envisioned those three concepts as huge, burly, vaguely homo-erotic wrestler type guys, ready to throw down in the ring. I'm not sure who I'm gonna blame that mental image on, but never fear, it'll be one of you.
Working as a tutor started out wonderfully for me. I enjoyed it, I seemed to be good at it, and it gave me spending money. It was a challenge, of course. I'm not the kind of guy that likes to get broadsided and feel like I can't articulate what I want to, and tutoring loves to hit you with that particular dirty stick. Every time I found myself stuttering, trying to figure out what the hell to say about the paper, or to explain why the sentence seemed awkward, whatever, I'd replay in my head afterwards. Try to plan out how to smooth out that wrinkle in the fabric of my sessions, if you will.
Random aside here - I may be all kinds of "anti-foundationalist, post-process, "down with the man!", as Andi put it, but I used to run my sessions with one hell of an iron fist. I've gotten better about it. If you catch me calling the tutees "comrade", feel free to smack me around a bit. I'm trying not to be authoritarian to my poor little subjects, most of whom I'd really rather huggle than lord it over.
I'm not good at juggling classes. I'm simply not. I fixate on one, get all obsessed with mulling it over, and completely forget about the others. English 3840, unfortunately, got the short end of the stick this semester. It's not that I didn't think about the class a lot (I most certainly did), it's just that as I worked, I was able to put the lessons to practical use. This left me feeling like I'd "done my homework" a lot of the time, simply from tutoring. It was pretty damn hard for me to talk myself into sitting down and putting a lot of thought or effort into the responses when I'd already picked what we'd read over for its useful bits and cast the rest into the rubbish heap.
I do that a lot. With everything. If I actually had a religion, it'd be this crazy-ass mix of all the things I like about Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Shinto, and various animistic religions that never managed to get an official name here in the West. Then all the annoying stuff (for instance, sex-is-a-sin) would get pitched and buried in the backyard. Then, of course, some crazy-ass bearded redneck would join forces with a pissed-off Tibetan and beat me up for their missing beliefs -- mug me for my loose commandments, as it were.
Anyway, to continue onward: I absolutely loved this class. I looked forward to it constantly. Well, maybe not so much when we were waxing pendantic on Works Cited, but for the most part this class was a blast. It's too bad my grade won't reflect how much I really did absorb and enjoy here.
It seems like the bad stuff always happens right when it's the most inconvenient, doesn't it? The past six months have been more or less nothing but a long string of really, REALLY weird shit broken by occasional lapses into calm. Actually, now that I think about it, that's been pretty much the past year. Hell, it goes longer than that. That's where the typical Derek flakiness comes from. I'm not really a flake, I promise. I'm normally pretty laid-back, and I DON'T actually feel the need to be sarcastic about everything under normal circumstances. It's just that I feel a life-induced embolism coming on pretty soon here, and I think I'm subconsciously trying to vent what little pressure I can before it pops and I fall over. So for all those times when y'all couldn't predict exactly where in the hell I was coming from, or even what in the hell I'd act like if you tried to be nice and say "hi" to me, I apologize.
So anyway, the middle of this semester started to go right down the ol' poop-chute for me, and it didn't stop. This, obviously, made the last part of the semester an absolute bear. I was always playing catch-up. ALWAYS. This was another factor in my inability to keep up with the journal -- I was usually two responses behind, with a presentation looming over my head, and what the hell is a logarithm anyway?!? It's really not anything that a normal college student would find out-of-the-ordinary... but I can do better than that, dammit. So stack a heaping, huge piece of self-castigation on top of all the other stuff that I'm skimming over, and you've got an idea on why I didn't keep up with this journal.
Looking back now, I'm overall okay with the way this semester went. I could have done a lot better, and really should have, but I also realize that I've gotta take baby steps sometimes, whether I like it or not. This sort of thing doesn't really come natural to me. I'm still fighting loads and loads of ingrained weirdness from earlier in my life that tells me to coast until someome gives me a task, and throw myself at that task face-first. In college, you can't coast. You don't get Op-Order: Homework. It's really just up to you, and I'm still trying to figure out how reliable "me" is.
Well, that's it for my last-ditch attempt to wring a few percentage points out of a class assignment that I ignored so totally for most of the semester that I often forgot it even existed for days at a time. Here's hoping I'll still have a job next semester.
~Derek
1. I hate journals. No, really, I do. I've never been good with them. I've had to keep them for several classes, and I always...ALWAYS...fall behind. Mainly, I just don't feel like writing constantly. I don't particularly write for fun, and I don't particularly feel like I have anything clever or amusing to write.
Now, you'll note the 1. That logically suggests that there's a 2. There is. I figure for the rest of this "Dear God Dr. Rogers Don't Flunk Me I'm Not A Lazy Useless Slug I Promise!" post, I'll just do a reflection on this class, this semester, and my job over that time period. That all will make clear what my #2 is for not keeping up with the blog.
This semester started off beautifully for me. Classes went well, I learned new things, etc. etc. and all that funky jazz. That part, I'm pretty sure, can be left to a "fill in the blank" approach. I had issues, and lots of them, with wrapping my head around the reading responses. They required brevity and directness, two things that I'm particularly un-good at. As a matter of fact, if there was anything that I was un-goodest at, brevity, directness, and math would be waging a three-way war, winner take all, for that honor.
For some reason I just envisioned those three concepts as huge, burly, vaguely homo-erotic wrestler type guys, ready to throw down in the ring. I'm not sure who I'm gonna blame that mental image on, but never fear, it'll be one of you.
Working as a tutor started out wonderfully for me. I enjoyed it, I seemed to be good at it, and it gave me spending money. It was a challenge, of course. I'm not the kind of guy that likes to get broadsided and feel like I can't articulate what I want to, and tutoring loves to hit you with that particular dirty stick. Every time I found myself stuttering, trying to figure out what the hell to say about the paper, or to explain why the sentence seemed awkward, whatever, I'd replay in my head afterwards. Try to plan out how to smooth out that wrinkle in the fabric of my sessions, if you will.
Random aside here - I may be all kinds of "anti-foundationalist, post-process, "down with the man!", as Andi put it, but I used to run my sessions with one hell of an iron fist. I've gotten better about it. If you catch me calling the tutees "comrade", feel free to smack me around a bit. I'm trying not to be authoritarian to my poor little subjects, most of whom I'd really rather huggle than lord it over.
I'm not good at juggling classes. I'm simply not. I fixate on one, get all obsessed with mulling it over, and completely forget about the others. English 3840, unfortunately, got the short end of the stick this semester. It's not that I didn't think about the class a lot (I most certainly did), it's just that as I worked, I was able to put the lessons to practical use. This left me feeling like I'd "done my homework" a lot of the time, simply from tutoring. It was pretty damn hard for me to talk myself into sitting down and putting a lot of thought or effort into the responses when I'd already picked what we'd read over for its useful bits and cast the rest into the rubbish heap.
I do that a lot. With everything. If I actually had a religion, it'd be this crazy-ass mix of all the things I like about Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Shinto, and various animistic religions that never managed to get an official name here in the West. Then all the annoying stuff (for instance, sex-is-a-sin) would get pitched and buried in the backyard. Then, of course, some crazy-ass bearded redneck would join forces with a pissed-off Tibetan and beat me up for their missing beliefs -- mug me for my loose commandments, as it were.
Anyway, to continue onward: I absolutely loved this class. I looked forward to it constantly. Well, maybe not so much when we were waxing pendantic on Works Cited, but for the most part this class was a blast. It's too bad my grade won't reflect how much I really did absorb and enjoy here.
It seems like the bad stuff always happens right when it's the most inconvenient, doesn't it? The past six months have been more or less nothing but a long string of really, REALLY weird shit broken by occasional lapses into calm. Actually, now that I think about it, that's been pretty much the past year. Hell, it goes longer than that. That's where the typical Derek flakiness comes from. I'm not really a flake, I promise. I'm normally pretty laid-back, and I DON'T actually feel the need to be sarcastic about everything under normal circumstances. It's just that I feel a life-induced embolism coming on pretty soon here, and I think I'm subconsciously trying to vent what little pressure I can before it pops and I fall over. So for all those times when y'all couldn't predict exactly where in the hell I was coming from, or even what in the hell I'd act like if you tried to be nice and say "hi" to me, I apologize.
So anyway, the middle of this semester started to go right down the ol' poop-chute for me, and it didn't stop. This, obviously, made the last part of the semester an absolute bear. I was always playing catch-up. ALWAYS. This was another factor in my inability to keep up with the journal -- I was usually two responses behind, with a presentation looming over my head, and what the hell is a logarithm anyway?!? It's really not anything that a normal college student would find out-of-the-ordinary... but I can do better than that, dammit. So stack a heaping, huge piece of self-castigation on top of all the other stuff that I'm skimming over, and you've got an idea on why I didn't keep up with this journal.
Looking back now, I'm overall okay with the way this semester went. I could have done a lot better, and really should have, but I also realize that I've gotta take baby steps sometimes, whether I like it or not. This sort of thing doesn't really come natural to me. I'm still fighting loads and loads of ingrained weirdness from earlier in my life that tells me to coast until someome gives me a task, and throw myself at that task face-first. In college, you can't coast. You don't get Op-Order: Homework. It's really just up to you, and I'm still trying to figure out how reliable "me" is.
Well, that's it for my last-ditch attempt to wring a few percentage points out of a class assignment that I ignored so totally for most of the semester that I often forgot it even existed for days at a time. Here's hoping I'll still have a job next semester.
~Derek
posted by Anonymous at 8:27 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home