Dr. Royal, you truly have me thinking differently about my education. I wish I took this class when I began at Marist last fall. However, I began as an education major and this is not a requirement for an education major. Honestly, I feel this class should be a requirement for ALL students no matter what their major. This class would be especially beneficial for young students who feel they are sure of what they want to do when they graduate yet have little or no experience in the professional world which can often times alter what we want out of a career and our lives in general. After many years of working in customer service positions, mostly insurance, I can say I do not want to do this forever. Actually, I do not want to do this for much longer. That is what brought me to Marist.
I am both anxious and excited to work on my degree plan. I found the last online session very interesting because I find myself trying to plan for the next semester as soon as I possibly can. I find myself planning far in advance for graduation and I feel really great when I register for the upcoming semester. Designing my degree plan is an assignment I am looking forward to completing. I feel that knowing what lies ahead helps me to feel more organized with my education goals.
Often times I find it difficult to point out my positive sides. Is it my right side, left side, front side? I just don’t know some days J But seriously, it is difficult for me to say, “I do this and I do it well.” Over the course of the last year what I can say about what I have learned is that I can take on a lot more than I ever thought. I work full time, I have steadily taken 9 credits for 3 semesters and even took 6 credits over the summer. I have two young children, I played on a women’s softball team over the summer and somehow I manage to have stayed sane. Okay, mostly sane. I thought of Eleanor Roosevelt’s saying just now, ‘a woman is like a tea bag, you never know how strong she is until she gets in hot water.’ I am the tea bag and all my hats are the hot water. I have learned about Photography, History, Spanish, various films, novels and I have even learned some really difficult 3D video animation. All of these subjects combined have given me a wealth of knowledge in a short period of time which I plan to use when I complete my Bachelor’s and move on to my Master’s.
What I struggle with the most is making all of this work for me effectively and maybe even more so, efficiently. Often times I am running on empty or waiting until the last minute to submit assignments. Each week I promise myself I will get ahead of the assignments for each class and then I find myself up at 11:59PM submitting that final online posting. One day I ran around in 4” heels on campus desperate for a working printer to print my first paper for a Psychology class I am currently taking. I did not succeed yet was grateful when my professor allowed for me to email her the assignment. Last week I simply overwhelmed myself and when I forgot my assignment for the same class, well, I broke down in tears. A 35 year old grown woman, a mother no less, cried to my teacher because I was so overwhelmed with work, school and the events of the week. I suffered from poor planning on my own part. I was alone in my office at work, coupled with some personal stress and I simply broke down. It happens from time to time.
Once again, I have made this promise to myself this week to get ahead of the assignments. So far I am feeling good about this. They say that it takes 21 days for something to become a habit, whoever they are. Let’s see how things look in 21 days and if I can get ahead of all of this work I have coming up. It really is a balancing out for me. I think that as adults we suffer from challenges teenagers do not have to deal with. It is not just about having a full time (or part time) job and a family. Simply put, as an older individual my stamina is not the same. I can not stay up until 2AM working on a paper and then function the next day. Youth is no longer on my side. And yes, there is the family and the full time job. Some areas of my life are not flexible. I have to be flexible with the areas that are and do my homework in every moment that I am able to all the while keeping my head above water.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Learning Styles
I prefer to try things out rather than thinking them through in most situations. In class, often times I find myself determining the assignment and jumping in. I will research as I go along but feel the need to have something in front of me other than a bunch of garbled notes. I suppose that I feel more accomplished when I have a paragraph written rather than an outline.
Over the summer I took a Film and Literature class. I was very excited at the beginning because I knew we would be reading books and watching movies like Harry Potter, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Hamlet. I dove in and began reading my first short story before class even began. All was off to a great start. As anyone who has taken an online class at Marist knows, classes are condensed to only 10 weeks yet material is covered as though the class is 16 weeks long. Online classes can be more difficult and time consuming than on ground classes. I waited far too long to begin my midterm, an essay on only one scene from Hamlet. I had reviewed the notes on the paper, yet I really glanced over them. I learned my lesson when my grade was delivered, the worst grade I have ever received in all of my life. As an active learner, quite possibly the absence of a class discussion about the paper is one problem for me with online classes. While I had the professor at my fingertips, I thought I understood the assignment yet I grossly misunderstood the task at hand. I saw the big picture, typical as a global learner, yet passed on all of the detail. This has me watching my assignments more closely. Because of the schedule I follow with work, school and family I do struggle with managing my time still. Maybe I work best under pressure, under the ticking clock. I loved the class, I just wish I had not spent the second half of it working as hard as I did. Don’t get me wrong, I work as hard as I can in all of my classes, I had to work especially hard these last 5 weeks though just to squeak out a passing grade. I did not go back to college to ‘pass’ or ‘get by.’ I returned to college to give it my all and get back a wealth of knowledge. You can imagine how disappointed I was when I didn’t hold up my end of the bargain. While the class itself was not difficult, this one assignment was although the difficulty was self inflicted. It did force me to realize that I can not just glance over my assignments with only a few hours to put into such an important task.
In the spring I took Nutrition. My professor was engaging and informative. All of the information she brought to the table can be useful to any one of us. She afforded the opportunity for the class to work in groups as well as individually. I feel that she involved each of us in class discussions each week which helped me to learn well. Often times she showed films about various subjects such as anorexia, poor eating habits and one that sticks out regarding a particular treatment for cancer patients. As a visual learner when it came time to take a test and write about these subjects, I could close my eyes and remember the films to get a clear picture of the subject. What made this class a positive learning experience is that I took away information I could use every day in feeding myself as well as my family. Not all classes allow for us to use what we learn every day. It is one of the few classes I kept the book for as well as all of my notes. I look back every now and again when one of my kids are sick to see if there is an alternative method to helping them out rather than grabbing an over the counter medication. The information learned in this class will help me for years to come.
After taking a couple of learning style questionnaires I think this was probably the most accurate. I took this one http://www.engr.ncsu.edu/learningstyles/ilsweb.html. The results point out that I am an active, intuitive, visual and global learner. I do not fall in the middle of any of the scales. I like to be a part of learning by doing, discover new possibilities, see the material in some way visually and I have a tendency to look at the big picture. These are very accurate in my learning style.
Over the summer I took a Film and Literature class. I was very excited at the beginning because I knew we would be reading books and watching movies like Harry Potter, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Hamlet. I dove in and began reading my first short story before class even began. All was off to a great start. As anyone who has taken an online class at Marist knows, classes are condensed to only 10 weeks yet material is covered as though the class is 16 weeks long. Online classes can be more difficult and time consuming than on ground classes. I waited far too long to begin my midterm, an essay on only one scene from Hamlet. I had reviewed the notes on the paper, yet I really glanced over them. I learned my lesson when my grade was delivered, the worst grade I have ever received in all of my life. As an active learner, quite possibly the absence of a class discussion about the paper is one problem for me with online classes. While I had the professor at my fingertips, I thought I understood the assignment yet I grossly misunderstood the task at hand. I saw the big picture, typical as a global learner, yet passed on all of the detail. This has me watching my assignments more closely. Because of the schedule I follow with work, school and family I do struggle with managing my time still. Maybe I work best under pressure, under the ticking clock. I loved the class, I just wish I had not spent the second half of it working as hard as I did. Don’t get me wrong, I work as hard as I can in all of my classes, I had to work especially hard these last 5 weeks though just to squeak out a passing grade. I did not go back to college to ‘pass’ or ‘get by.’ I returned to college to give it my all and get back a wealth of knowledge. You can imagine how disappointed I was when I didn’t hold up my end of the bargain. While the class itself was not difficult, this one assignment was although the difficulty was self inflicted. It did force me to realize that I can not just glance over my assignments with only a few hours to put into such an important task.
In the spring I took Nutrition. My professor was engaging and informative. All of the information she brought to the table can be useful to any one of us. She afforded the opportunity for the class to work in groups as well as individually. I feel that she involved each of us in class discussions each week which helped me to learn well. Often times she showed films about various subjects such as anorexia, poor eating habits and one that sticks out regarding a particular treatment for cancer patients. As a visual learner when it came time to take a test and write about these subjects, I could close my eyes and remember the films to get a clear picture of the subject. What made this class a positive learning experience is that I took away information I could use every day in feeding myself as well as my family. Not all classes allow for us to use what we learn every day. It is one of the few classes I kept the book for as well as all of my notes. I look back every now and again when one of my kids are sick to see if there is an alternative method to helping them out rather than grabbing an over the counter medication. The information learned in this class will help me for years to come.
After taking a couple of learning style questionnaires I think this was probably the most accurate. I took this one http://www.engr.ncsu.edu/learningstyles/ilsweb.html. The results point out that I am an active, intuitive, visual and global learner. I do not fall in the middle of any of the scales. I like to be a part of learning by doing, discover new possibilities, see the material in some way visually and I have a tendency to look at the big picture. These are very accurate in my learning style.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Maslows Needs
Earlier this year I had to take a Spanish class. I truly feel I have never struggled so much in a class in all of my education career. Unfortunately, I was not alone in the struggle in the class. The teacher changed the syllabus almost weekly and was terribly disorganized. Couple the constant changes and disorganization with a condensed class (8 weeks), working full time, two kids and taking 9 other credits bringing me to full time status for over a month and I turned into a pile of mush by the time I needed to work on my Spanish homework. Partly I feel I was having a Wonder Woman moment, thinking that I could pull all of life together and get an A in every class. I had this severely high need to achieve. However, I did the opposite of a typical individual with a high need to achieve and took more risks than I normally would. The biggest risk for me was not doing well in school during this time. My motivation was to complete the classes I needed for my degree of study at the time and do well at the same time. All without burning out!
Starting out my confidence level was high. I anticipated a great class. In the end I made an amazing friend who I love dearly, yet received a D in the class. The friendship alone was worth taking the class. The learning experience was harder for me to grasp at first. I did not want to admit to taking on too much, shhh, I still do not want to admit to taking on too much. I suppose I can say that I learned that I am self-confident because I took on a great challenge, worked hard and absolutely refused to give up in the end. I moved on, or rather moved past it. I would have to say that my motivation was extrinsic in the sense that the obvious external reward was completing the course and doing well. I am more motivated when the end result comes from within and I truly enjoy myself at whatever it is I am doing. Taking a class that I must take that ends up being a tornado of mistakes most definitely was not enjoyable for me.
I feel that Maslow would say that this not being an intrinsically motivated experience interfered with my need to achieve an A in the course, or even a B for that matter. My heart was not in it after the 2nd class when I recognized the insane pace I was living. The grade aside, I learned very little. I have a stack of index cards filled with Spanish words, phrases and places, yet I can not put together a sentence in Spanish to save my life.
In the end I am grateful for having taking the class. I now know that it is okay to take a step back and not be Wonder Woman at all times. I am still taking on 9 credits while working full time and being a parent to two young children. It is still a lot, however, it is more manageable. I have a higher level of motivation and confidence when I am not as stressed, as I was earlier this year.
Starting out my confidence level was high. I anticipated a great class. In the end I made an amazing friend who I love dearly, yet received a D in the class. The friendship alone was worth taking the class. The learning experience was harder for me to grasp at first. I did not want to admit to taking on too much, shhh, I still do not want to admit to taking on too much. I suppose I can say that I learned that I am self-confident because I took on a great challenge, worked hard and absolutely refused to give up in the end. I moved on, or rather moved past it. I would have to say that my motivation was extrinsic in the sense that the obvious external reward was completing the course and doing well. I am more motivated when the end result comes from within and I truly enjoy myself at whatever it is I am doing. Taking a class that I must take that ends up being a tornado of mistakes most definitely was not enjoyable for me.
I feel that Maslow would say that this not being an intrinsically motivated experience interfered with my need to achieve an A in the course, or even a B for that matter. My heart was not in it after the 2nd class when I recognized the insane pace I was living. The grade aside, I learned very little. I have a stack of index cards filled with Spanish words, phrases and places, yet I can not put together a sentence in Spanish to save my life.
In the end I am grateful for having taking the class. I now know that it is okay to take a step back and not be Wonder Woman at all times. I am still taking on 9 credits while working full time and being a parent to two young children. It is still a lot, however, it is more manageable. I have a higher level of motivation and confidence when I am not as stressed, as I was earlier this year.
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