Sigh.
I thought I was ahead on my project. And then they moved the goalposts.
To be fair, I’m probably still a little ahead. I was 90% of the way there; now I am 60% of the way there. But let’s say the other normal people came in at 0% are are now at 40%.
So I’m technically ahead. But in the class, everyone else took 40 steps forward and I took 30 steps backwards.
It is demoralizing.
Well … I didn’t include the Futurism poster. I coded it, got it working … and then took it out and posted the assignment.
Just can’t break the rules.
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Another set of adjectives for you all: I don’t know where this idea was sparked, an earlier class or conversation or blog post; but there was a challenge to describe (for your own benefit) your own learning style and best learning environment.
Several findings from social psychology sprang to mind, but then I got into it. Experiments aside, social psych aside, what have I found works for me? I have 40+ years of experience at this, maybe I can find some patterns.
My learning style, I have decided, is thorough, detailed, and tenacious. It’s also strongly visual (I have to read things), followed by hands on, followed (very distantly) by listening. And if I’m really going to get it, I have to write it down myself.
I have to read material multiple times. The first time is to get the overall point. The second time is to get the structure of how we’re all going to get to this point. The third time is to identify what sections I already know and don’t know. The fourth time is to dig into the parts I don’t know and slowly work through whatever is necessary to fix that. The fifth time is to pretend I’m explaining it to someone and put all the parts into my own words (and fix anything that bogs me down). The sixth time is to slowly read the whole thing and verify that I understand, at each juncture, both the parts and the whole.
I’ve wasted a lot of energy trying to read things in depth the first time, and to berate myself for having to read things over and over. But hey – that’s someone else’s learning style. By stepping back and figuring out that I have a learning style, and that if I let it work for me it works very well for me, I’ve stopped berating myself for not being someone else.
I also do better in the late afternoon and mid to late evening (there’s a gap between about 5 and 8 where I should just take a break). I do better with soft instrumental music, neutral temperature, and the slight possibility of interruption.
Anyway …. if you haven’t stepped back and figured out your own learning style, you should. There’s always something new to learn, and it’s a lot more fun if you understand how you’re learning it.
For example: so many folks say how great You Tube is for learning things. I can not learn from You Tube. It’s all listening, and I do not learn well that way. I get a lot out of videos when I’m just filling in details. But I know better than to start with You Tube, and that has saved me a lot of grief.
I am taking a coding class. Part of the class exercises are to replicate some given example webpage.
It’s still in the intro phase of the class, so it’s still covering parts of coding that I know very well. So at first I was particular to the point of ridiculousness (what font is the example text? Is the heading and text in the same font? Can I open the example page as an image and count the pixels in that tabstop? If I add a hover effect, do you want the same green or a different accent green? …. These are all questions I asked, literally.)
After some heroically supressed eyerolls on the part of my TAs and instructors, I started to relax. Started to add subtle rollover and text effects that ~could~ be part of the example page. I mean, they’re showing me a static image. Who’s to say that if you hover over something, you won’t trigger some interactive effect?
No one has said anything to me about it, but I’ve been getting full marks. Bear in mind, full marks consists of ‘turned in on time’ and ‘has some passing resemblance to the original’.
So … it’s been several weeks of this. I’m starting to relax a bit more. The latest assignment has this retro futuristic vibe to it. And the point of this exercise is responsive design – that as you resize your browser, different things will happen.
And I so, so, SO want to throw in the Wondermark Futurism poster. One just one of the ‘responsive’ layouts – the largest one, where there’s lots of space left blank. Just to amuse myself; possibly to amuse the instructors. I think it’s terribly funny. I think it’s thematically related to the example page. It will require some extra (stretch to call it advanced) coding.
Yet I wonder … is this going to far away from the intent of the exercise? Will they also find it amusing, or am I the only one who finds myself quite this entertaining? Am I showing creativity and initiative, or am I being disrespectful and missing the whole point of the exercise? Am I over thinking this?
Project has to be turned in tomorrow (Sunday). Fate of the Futurism poster is still unknown.
About a year and a half ago, I posted about wanting to define what my particular voice was. Its something I continued to think about, and eventually I settled on this list:
My voice is approachable, knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and articulate.
This is mostly for professional communication, though the idea behind the exercise is that while one’s tone changes to match the occasion, one’s voice is consistent. And it does give me a certain framing structure when I’m writing and email (or any other writing) to remind myself of these core characteristics.
It’s kind of like any kind of self-analysis in that regard. By focusing on certain elements, I enhance those elements until through a bit of self-fulfilling prophesy they become the core attributes I defined them to be. Which is why I made sure my definition was all positively framed.
However……
A few weeks ago I was frustrated and a little sick and in a generally unhappy place, and I wrote some things that were very decidedly not positively framed. And then, as I got un-frustrated and un-sick and .. un-unhappy? .. I thought about how I’d written what I wrote, and the voice that I used. So I wrote out the characteristics of that voice.
Which came out as sarcastic, self-deprecating, apathetic, and rambling.
I wrote the two lists side by side to contemplate them. What could I learn; who was reflected in these two lists. And it dawned on me in this flash of insight that they were the same list, just mirrored back at each other. In a good mood I am approachable; in a bad mood I am sarcastic (possibly caustic). I see myself as knowledgeable; I am self-deprecating. Enthusiasm turns to apathy; articulate (presumably focused) becomes rambling. It’s all the same essential me in there, just in a positive or negative light.
Like most psychological insights, it seems perfectly obvious when you just lay it out there, but the discovery was personally illuminating.