I'm now about two thirds of my way through this semester, and I'm still not confident of my abilities to do the questions in most of the modules. It's probably a sign that I'm not trying hard enough. Zoning out is still a major issue, and it's starting to snowball because I'm beginning to not know what the lecturer is talking about even when I do pay attention! Right now I really don't think my report card is going to look good, so I've really got to work on it. Also I need to put together a proper resume.
For a lot of (thankfully not all) subject content, I find myself turning to the notes and lectures of other universities to grasp new concepts and their nitty-gritty details. One example would be matrices with things like subspaces and eigen vectors. Also new to me would be 3D graphs and integration and differentiation of 3 planes. So now I'm really grateful for all the universities who have made their course materials available online (e.g MIT's opencourseware), and also as my senior dubbed it, the "University of Youtube", which can teach in 10 minutes what a lecturer may take half an hour to explain with us still not getting it. As all this happens, I believe that I still enjoy learning, unfortunately as we hastily rush through the lectures, I think this enjoyment is being stifled.
For the last couple of weeks, I find that it has been mainly non-academic things that I have been looking forward to, and also these things keeping me going. And I believe I have over-committed myself a bit. I've got some physical activity everyday of the week except Sunday. So between the 6 days, it's either rock climbing, dance, or karate, with karate being my anchor activity. That means if I ever become so incredibly busy that I have not enough time, I would still make time for karate. During my meal times, I usually have the same company or none at all. I thought I could go around my hall and make friends with everyone, but then I realized that my skin isn't thick enough, and so within my hall I guess I have a lot of new acquaintances. This also means that I have less people to group study with, which makes things a lot less fun, on the upside a bit less distracting. Yup, a bit because I still get distracted. >.<"
Here's a summary of how I think I'm doing and what needs to be worked on for the various activities:
Karate
Landing combinations - I tend to break away and retreat after landing a good clean hit, instead of following up with more. Also during my combinations, I need to take over the spot which my opponent was standing on.
Throwing feints when breaking away - this would discourage my opponent from coming forward as I retreat, usually something like a blind jab would be sufficient, but the foot work still feels very unatural,
Triangle kicks - When throwing these, I tend to land my instep on the chest, when ideally I should be using the ball of my foot, so as to penetrate the solar plexus or ribs.
Keeping my guard up - I tend to drop my guard when throwing just about any technique, but I tend to open up even more when throwing kicks.
Facing the opponent - I think I need to get in closer to my opponent because if I overextend myself to punch, I actually expose my back to hooks from tall opponents.
Dance
I don't really know what to look out for in dance, because I don't know what technique is considered good or what points to look out for. I'm still at the monkey-see monkey-do stage, except that I probably move more like a gorilla . =X
Rock climbing
As for this, I'm going to keep off the high walls outside first because those have entry fees meaning that my wallet will take a big hit. So I'm working on making it worth it by gaining some basic techniques and wall sticking endurance. That means staying on the low school wall, and practicing first. Not that I'm very good on the low wall anyway. Also rock climbing is not something that is very cheap to get into, and thus I've yet to buy climbing shoes, but that's okay, because I believe I can adapt.
Other than that, I've been wondering whether it would be good for me to take a year's break and during this time, go learn the stuff that I'd be learning when I return, so that I can kick ass, and score a really shiny GPA, since a lot of the content can be found online anyway. The thing is that I'd need to find out what topics our version of the modules contain. The crux of the issue then would be my discipline I guess.
Oh and my idea for the month would a be a tablespoon with markings for the 5ml and 10 ml levels, with the markings done like the contour lines of a topographic map, this way people who cook, or people who need to take medicine can accurately measure out a teaspoon (5ml), and tablespoon (10ml), and the more common dosages of liquid medicine which if I remember correctly come in increments of 5 or 10ml as well.
