...Action?

What did I learn this week in class?

What if I didn’t learn anything? What do I do then?

This week in class was kind of a rough one. It seemed to me that there was a bit of tension because people hadn’t been doing what they were supposed to, or simply weren’t keeping up with the class work. Which got me thinking.

Even though certain aspects of this class are based on group work, most of it comes from the individual and working by yourself, on your own time and depends largely on individual discipline. The deadlines that are given are few and far-between and, for the most part, are not flexible. The plays we see create our due-dates, and we can’t beg for an extra performance if we miss the ones that are presented.

This brought me to the conclusion that a person taking this class who had no, or very little, self-discipline and time management abilities would be in pretty big trouble – assuming they care about their courses.

It’s hard to get a move on when working on things that you know aren’t due for another two weeks, or even in a month or more. “There’s no rush,” is a common thought for me. But then the time that I was going to use for that Far Far Away Project fills up with other things by the time I get to it, and what’s really let is just a teeny sliver of the whole cake.

Nobody likes being left with just a sliver.

Take these blog entries as an example. I’m supposed to be thoughtfully considering my activities of each week, sharing what I’ve learnt. Carefully organising all of my new reflections into a this little blogspace, and creating something that will eventually supply me with material to write my final learning synthesis. Thing. But sometimes – some weeks, rather – I find myself not really thinking about what I’m doing as I’m doing it, and just doing what seems like the ‘right’ thing to write at the time. So, by the time I get to working on my weekly blog post, I get a little stuck and can’t figure out what to write about.

I think that this whole class works in pretty much the same way. If you don’t take a second to actually think about something in this class while you’re doing it – reading a play, researching something about it, or even just writing an ‘inkblot’ – then you’re not going to get a whole lot out of it. And if you don’t even get as far as doing some of this stuff because you just can’t seem to motivate yourself for whatever reason…well, the rest of the class will be getting a bit of a let down, and you’re probably not going to have all that great an experience in the course.

I need a day-planner.

[Sorry for the over-use of the ever intrusive “You” in this post. I don’t mean “you” the reader. It’s merely meant to be an inhabitant of my hypothetical situations.]