Dragon Stout

My brain hit the wall at about 7:30 last night...I spent about 10 minutes trying to read a lecture, and I realized I hadn't absorbed a single word of it. No point spending the rest of the night in the library pointlessly, so I went out for a nice dinner for a change (ie anything costing more than $15USD). Had ribs with a few friends...glorious ribs. Afterwards went to a bar for a few drinks, and woke up quite lazy this morning. This means I'm behind and have no real urge or energy to get started. I need to get in the zone soon, as Ive wasted 20 minutes in the library already. Maybe I'll have a coffee.

As I may have mentioned earlier, I tried a new method this week, where instead of watching lectures in class and then filling in the gaps at home, I just watch them online once, slowly, but completely. The benefits are that I should theoretically spend less time going back and forth between class and library, and because there's less hectic management, I should have a more complete understanding of the material instead of letting small holes accumulate. It has an inherent weakness, in that I spend less time revisiting a concept between lecture/filling gaps/notetaking, and memorization tends to work best through repetition. Nonetheless, I feel as though the repetition I used to be doing was mostly passive, and only on the lower order of Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning, so not a huge loss. 

Another problem is that by spending more time on each subject every day and actually recalling/memorizing it in one step (as opposed to putting it off for the weekend), I don't have enough time to continually be caught up in class with other students that attend lecture daily. I fall behind, especially as the weekend nears, but then catch up. Its a "slow and steady wins the race" approach. Nonetheless, it can be disheartening to hear students discuss material I haven't reached yet, and requires continue mental reminders that the process is slower but potentially more complete.

With video lectures, the onus is on the student to make his/her own schedule, and there have definitely been some adjustments that need to be made. I found that in the last few days, I spent too much time on a single lecture trying to learn all the minute details, and this set me behind. While I've been slowly getting better at setting a cap on the amount of time I study, I haven't really put a maximum time per lecture, and this set me further behind than I would have liked at this point. But then again, it feels like we're always behind. 

Anyways, I'm going to get a coffee to kick start my focus and hit the books. Hopefully go out for dinner again tonight, if I can make the rest of today count. Oh, and I passed by exam. With the next test including more material and of increasing difficulty, I expect the exam average to dip slightly. Additionally, as the other MERP students who took a pre-med semester start running out of school topics that they have already studied and are all exposed to completely new material, I expect their average to dip slightly, which should hopefully push me slightly higher above the slightly higher than average than I am currently. 

Apologies for the terrible grammer and sentence structure, as I've been falling back into the habit of not including personal pronouns, which I blame on 3 years of Japanese. 

Domo Arigato, Mr Roboto.