Two of my three courses for the year are done!
I managed to do two essays and a 2 hour test last week without having a mental breakdown (can’t break what isn’t fixed!) and now I have a whole week in which to study for my one and only exam. The problem with this is that it IS a whole week. If the exam was tomorrow I’d be able to focus and study hard just because I simply have no other option but because there’s still so much time I seem to be easily distracted by anything.
Being distracted would be okay if I had kept up with my class work and done all my readings every week, unfortunately I’m not a good student like that and I still have to read lots and lots of the readings. The other problem is that I’ve become really uninterested in the course itself. Learning about South Asia, the region of the world that holds over 1/6th of all the people, seemed like a good idea for my International Relations major at the time of enrollment but I have since discovered the error of my ways. The lecturer herself is a nice person, but the way the course has been developed just didn’t grab me at all. I think it needed to be divided into a 1 hour lecture and a 1 hour tutorial session, instead of a 2 hour lecture that divides up into ‘discussion groups’ half way through. ‘get into groups’ seems to have been interpreted by a majority of the class as ‘go home now’ and those that are left have just been groups of friends having a chat about the weekend from what I noticed. Oh well, it’s a fairly new course so maybe it will improve for the next time round. In the mean time I have 5 more days to study all about the Indian, Sri Lankan, Kashmiri and Pakistani political systems and history / culture and develop some essay ideas.
After a busy week last week I told myself that I would have Saturday and Sunday for being as lazy as I liked and then get into the studying from Monday. The lazy weekend was good, I caught up with friends for Yum Cha on Sunday which was delicious, I watched a few DVDs, and a few episodes of some Japanese TV dramas. Now it’s Tuesday evening and it’s turned into more of a gradual build up into the intense focused study. I read a couple of powerpoint from the lectures yesterday and a couple of chapters of readings today. Tomorrow I’ll read a couple more powerpoints AND a couple of chapters. So long as the next day is more than the day before it’s got to be a step in the right direction… right?
For now it’s back to killing Zombies and watching TV. At the moment, ‘Man Vs Wild’ and later ‘Outrageous Fortune’ so it would be unreasonable to be expected to study with that to watch right? The next problem is the fact its fucking freezing in this part of the world at the moment and what to have for dinner that doesn’t require effort… hmmm… wish me luck!