Burnout
On regular academics. That's never happened before. I've been burned out before, but it's always been because of attempting to do way too much _extra curricular_ math to prep for competitions, or to reach some absurd goal that I've set (know the Fundamental Theorem of Galois Theory by the end of 12th grade, yeah... that's beyond my limits). But now I'm burned out... on classwork.
The remedy? The same as it's always been -- don't do any math until some tempting problem walks my way and entices me to spend an entire evening conjecturing and proving and failing and and and all of those other things that brought me to math in the first place. The difference? This time I get to boot my classes. Nananana not going turn in my next Algebra p-set (it's only 2% of my grade, and I know that I know the material on there), gonna skip Schlag's 5 page Zeta Function Gauntlet, and I ain't touching that 3-week complex analysis P-set until the time feels right.
This is fun. The fact that burnout only happened in extracurriculars in high school just revealed to me something interesting. Extracurriculars are so important in High School _because_ classes suck so hard. In college, they don't play such a big role, because your instructors finally expect you to be capable of thinking and breathing simultaneously (and... sometimes they also expect you to be able to prove things about conformal maps between subsets of the complex plane too).
Wheeeee! I've gone from mildly depressed to excited and carefree. The feeling rocks!
The remedy? The same as it's always been -- don't do any math until some tempting problem walks my way and entices me to spend an entire evening conjecturing and proving and failing and and and all of those other things that brought me to math in the first place. The difference? This time I get to boot my classes. Nananana not going turn in my next Algebra p-set (it's only 2% of my grade, and I know that I know the material on there), gonna skip Schlag's 5 page Zeta Function Gauntlet, and I ain't touching that 3-week complex analysis P-set until the time feels right.
This is fun. The fact that burnout only happened in extracurriculars in high school just revealed to me something interesting. Extracurriculars are so important in High School _because_ classes suck so hard. In college, they don't play such a big role, because your instructors finally expect you to be capable of thinking and breathing simultaneously (and... sometimes they also expect you to be able to prove things about conformal maps between subsets of the complex plane too).
Wheeeee! I've gone from mildly depressed to excited and carefree. The feeling rocks!