In my experience, I have found myself to be annoying to others when I talk about my school life. People ask me "Savannah, how do you work full time, take six classes a semester, and still have time to be involved in your volunteer work and social activities?"
"Well dear friends," I say, "I work ahead if my professor lets me, and if they don't I do anyway."
It makes me sound a little to good to be true right? I know they are thinking "What is she hiding, whats she not saying? How does she have the time to sleep?". The truth of it is, at the start of any semester I like to try to get at least two weeks ahead if I can manage. Some semesters are harder to do this than others.
I hate the pressure of turning in assignments late, or at the deadline exactly. Even though the argument made is that "Diamonds are made under pressure", I always prefer to turn things in early if I can. And with online courses like this I can. However, some professors only allow for you to accomplish one weeks work at a time. Or they force you to wait for others to do the work so you can comment on their work for a complete grade. And the procrastinators far outweigh the earlier birds, thus hindering my fast track. And professors may have their reason. But personally I find this a cruel and slow torment. Why wouldn't you want your students to feel the freedom of knowing they have done next weeks assignment so that they can focus on what is coming further down the line and really absorb the learning? I feel that a week to week system is a really dangerous from an educational stand point. Why you ask? My logic is thus... If you are always living week to week and stressing deadlines, are you really learning? Or are you binging and purging your class information? You devour the information only to spit it back up and then you move onto the next week, forgetting what you had just done. So, to any fellow students and academics readying this, manage your time to your benefit! Do not let deadlines rule you, dominate your deadlines!
Working full time and taking six classes sounds like a nightmare. I'd also be asking how you manage to survive that if you weren't already explaining that in this post. I wish I could stay motivated as long as you so that I could also be two weeks ahead of class. By time I finish the current week's work in this class and my other classes I just want to relax and breathe.
ReplyDelete6 classes and working full time.... x-0 that is crazy! I did 5 classes last semester and I barely was hanging on. That is an awesome strategy that you have and thank you for sharing that with us. I am going to try that next semester with my classes. Its easy to work ahead at the beginning of the semester because the first couple weeks are usually pretty slow. Thats a perfect time to take advantage of the spare time.
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