Time Summary: January 18th-January 24th

This semester, I’ve made it a goal to do a much better job of tracking the time I spend studying.  My biggest reason for doing this is to try and eliminate some of the time I waste doing unproductive things.  The time spent this week might look a little low, but I didn’t include a couple of the first assignments and the first week of class is usually a lot of light, introductory stuff.

Week 1 January 18th-January 24th

Class	Date	Start	End	Total Study Time(minutes)	Notes
MIS-Web		1144	1440	115	Reading and posts
MIS-SAD				128	Reading, Exercises,  and discussion board posts.
PHIL				35	Worked on study guides
Administrative				30	Partially added assignments for Philosophy, looked ahead to the next week for assignments
MIS-Web	1/24/2010	1827		210	Worked on telnet assignments, read third chapter
WEEK TOTAL				=518 minutes (8.63 hours)
TOTAL WASTE				0

Brick wall

Don’t bang your head off of a brick wall. Good advice! Same thing goes for studying. If I get stuck on something, I stubbornly resolve to stare at it until I resolve it. Instead of taking a breather and looking at something else, I lose time and gain frustration.

This week, I had a telnet assignment in class. I spent roughly 5 hours on the assignment, and 3.5 of those were spent stuck on a single issue.  I eventually did walk away and took a break from it.  When I came back I spent about 15 minutes and resolved it.  Stupid syntax error.  Simple.  I wish I had done that a long time ago!

Still no CLEP

The natural science CLEP has been difficult to get to! It seems like every time I start to prepare for it, another, more urgent assignment comes in that requires immediate attention.   This time, it was a changing requirement for a course that meant that I had to test out of yet another pre-requisite course.

Thankfully, the course I tested out of was was relatively easy.  I studied off and on through the week and just took the test.  The exam consisted of 100 questions for which I had 60 minutes to answer.   I ended up with an 84.  I was happy with the grade.  This is another course that will show up on my transcript as a “complete”, so the B will not affect my GPA.  I thought I would have done a little better, but some of the terminology used in the exam was different than that used in the class I took.

So, instead of knocking out the CLEP, I have knocked out YET another low-level class that I thought was already completed.  I wonder if I can count any of this credit towards a second bachelors? I’m going to end up with a lot more than I need for this degree.

The delay might be a benefit in disguise, because the more I read about the Natural Science CLEP, the more difficult it looks.  The combination of Biology and Earth Science on one exam makes for a really broad study area.

Complaining About Work Doesn’t Help



I’m sitting in class behind a guy who has done nothing but complain about the work.  Of course, he’s behind on all of the assignments because they were just too unreasonable to think about working on.  Through no fault of his own, he postponed working on the assignments until now, the day that they are due.  In the last four classes, I’ve heard him spend enough time complaining about the assignments to have done at least one of them.

The thing to take away from this: If you can’t change it, don’t waste time complaining about it.  You might actually get some of it done if you use that time to work on it!