Reading.
At secondary school, during GCSEs, I had to read the assigned texts for English and I read text books and sometimes I read photocopied hand outs the teacher gave us. This, at the time, was quite manageable. Three years of having hardly any reading set has made the part of my brain that made that manageable go to sleep, it would seem.
I knew when I decided to make the drastic change from Geophysical Sciences to Journalism that it was going to be a completely different learning experience to that I’d become used to. No more sitting with maths problems and coming with a definite answer (or not, as the case very often was). No more being able to learn facts, regurgitate them in an exam, and get marks. Not even being able to use those facts to work out answers to related questions. I knew those days were gone, and a wave of essays and reading was just on the horizon.
I just never anticipated how much reading.
I have at the most nine contact hours a week but in the whole two weeks I’ve been in time tabled lessons, I’ve yet to have met those nine hours. Plenty of time for reading. Maybe. But when it takes me three hours to read one chapter of my philosophy book (and make notes), that time begins to slip away a little. I simply do not understand how, with so many free hours in the week, I end up having to read six chapters of three different books (four from one, two each from the other two) in one day.
Ok, I do know how. Because I did the reading for last Monday’s lecture and this Monday’s lecture all in one week and decided I had time to spare to see a friend yesterday.
The me from GCSEs, though not perfectly equipped to deal with this level of private studying, is probably a lot better equipped than the now me. My motivation to get to where I need to be has… died, since I started university last year. Gone are the days when I would work solidly through Christmas break on the off chance I might decide to accept an offer of three As. It’s as if everything I learned about learning whilst I was at school and college disappeared the moment I sat down in the lecture hall last year. I really need to get that motivation back, and figure out my time management.
(On a side note, today has been the most productive day of the week so far. Not only have I almost finished my to do list but I’ve also done quite a bit of painting between chapters. Looks like I might have figured out a study method…)
The Ghoul Student 