Personal Blogs

This afternoon I squatted in my garden, in the sun, moving the few heavy things that I had upon my person [the stabby-murder craft knife, my bottle of pimms, my bottle of lemonade] onto the bits of paper where I was trying to make sense of these counting problems. When I forgot to do this my groups winged there way into an uncaring world.

Best day for ages.

Bring myself to work at completing my group theory TMA today, and I realized that there are important concepts unlearnt during my task-displacement walk.

Stuffed is what I am

well, why I blog[2]

My school has an embedded police-person, he said to me once, “my first partner told me to slow down…if you are walking too fast you aren’t watching”. Life is like that—it’s easy to let it go past without enjoying it.

Every morning and evening I walk along the canal, dodging the joggers and cyclists who don’t see what I see—the wild-flowers, the bees, the kingfisher, the perch, the big pike, the day spring arrives, the day autumn comes…they are going too fast. That’s [partly] what blogging is—looking, properly, at your life and remembering it for future reference.

Let’s take my M208 as an example: reading my posts back I see a pattern—a nagging sense of dissatisfaction with myself. Why? Aye, there’s the rub—there’s the looking and then there’s understanding. If you don’t read your own stuff back and reflect then you’ve missed half the point—blogging gives you a platform to make you better. So…

Partly, I think, that it’s down to my lack of technique, I’m a great fan of technique. [I can do some of the working, but it doesn’t come naturally.] So far, with maths, I’ve been reliant on the technique that I learnt at school, where I understood nothing. Now I’m grasping at the understanding without having developed the technique. I feel unsafe.

Developing technique takes time and effort, I haven’t made the time or the effort; I think that I need to. I could just ignore this and still pass, but that’s what I’ve been doing—‘working’ the course rather that working at it. I’m doing this [OU stuff] for me, if I fail nothing will change except my conception of me.

That’s a reason to blog—I might have come to this realization of what was wrong without it, but I suspect that I wouldn’t have. It’s easier to be honest when the person you are trying to lie to is your own words.

2011–07–02

better…

For the first time this year I’ve got my baseball boots on—summer has started. I had a tutorial this morning, lovely Groups. Getting to my tutorial is always fun; It goes in stages:

1. I walk along the canal to Tolcross[ish], very bucolic—ducks, swallows, reeds, swans, dogs and the bikers who seem to be trying to end my life.
2. I get to Tolcross[ish], the city, and head for the Grassmarket, via the West port, the second-hand-bookshop region of the town. Here I buy my old maths books, but I don’t tarry
3. Then there’s the Grassmarket, a seething mass of tourists and drunks even at nine-thirty on a Saturday morning. Full of light and pubs
4. The Cowgate—a shaded urban-canyon where strange pale-people stagger around looking around for the night-club they think they’ve just left
5. You swing up towards the High Street where the world streams past
6. You do the maths

Afterwards we go to The Task and have a drink and a catch-up chat.

After a slightly torrid-time personally I feel healed, and ravenous for maths.

2011–06–22

overload[3]

This is becoming boring.

I’ve had to take a day off work tomorrow so that I can complete my TMA. I’ve still got one-and-one-half questions to do and one unit book still only glanced at. I’m angry with me—this is the worst [OU] mess that I’ve ever been in, and I should know better, I ain’t no tyro. There are excuses: the M257 exam, a busy work-life, a new computer and it’s crappy default behaviour, my run-down condition [back under eight stone]. Still…

One of the most important things that the OU has taught me is to be honest, about me. And if I’m being honest, this was inevitable. There’s too much going on in my life, something had to give. True, I spent Sunday lying on the couch reading a book [not a course one], but I needed that—another thing that I’ve learnt, know when you’re knackered. To be aware of your failings is a form of success.

We’re all going to be here, where I’m now, sometime—the nadir—the point is to win through. It’s the mental toughness, it’s the “I won’t lie down’, it’s the I’m going to learn whatever, that will pull us through. Actually it’s about your mastery of you.

We should all wake at dawn, watch the Sun come up and just say, “I can do it!”. We don’t, but in our heads we must pretend that we do.

[password hell so I'll post here.]

The ultimate chocolate sundae. And oh, the guilt.

[Warning! JavaScript and prime Numbers.]

a tma moment

this one is plan B, for sure