Jumping in vs. taking your time
I have written quite often about how my visual learning style has impacted my experience of higher education. Today, I'm going to deviate a bit and talk about another aspect of learning styles: global versus sequential.
I commented today that I felt ready to spend a good deal of time tackling my written exam (paper). As usual, I've been flailing around, not sure how to approach it. I have discovered that when I begin any new project, it takes a bit of "flailing" before I feel ready to actually start. It's not that I'm doing nothing. I'm thinking about it, but until I have a plan of approach, I can't actually sit down and start making a physical effort to do it.
I'm fairly certain this is why I prefer things like take-home exams. I have to create a "structure" or plan of attack for approaching my work. I have to have a virtually completed project or a good idea of what the completed project will look like before I can start working. For exams, this means I need to look at a problem and then turn ideas over in my head. After an arbitrary amount of time, I will suddenly know how to tackle it and then throw everything else I'm doing out the window in an effort to work on it. My husband always thought this was funny. I would get an exam and read it through. The next day, at dinner for instance, I would jump up and say, "I've got it," and run off to work. Then I would put a very concentrated effort toward completing things.
For this paper, I've had to plan out not only how the paper should look but also how I plan to structure my efforts. Where do I start with the research? How do I compile my information? It may sound pretty straight forward, but I find that unless I have a the big picture figured out as well as a good amount of detail about the specifics of the plan completed, I fall into a state of mental paralysis, unable to even begin because the project will seem too overwhelming.
That is one reason why I'm very excited about my dissertation project: it was very obvious to me how I would go about doing the research, including what intermediate steps I would need to take.
My husband has commented that he does things differently. He jumps in and figures out how to organize the information as he's working with it. Sometimes this means he gets part way through and then has to go back and redo things whereas I seldom find I have that problem.
We have taken classes together where we had take-home exams. Neither one of us tended finish earlier than the other, and despite our different approaches, we often got similar grades. Thus, I'm guessing that neither approach has a real obvious benefit over the other (although people's perception is often that the "doer" is doing more than the "thinker" who is organizing the project in their head).
So how do you tackle projects?
I commented today that I felt ready to spend a good deal of time tackling my written exam (paper). As usual, I've been flailing around, not sure how to approach it. I have discovered that when I begin any new project, it takes a bit of "flailing" before I feel ready to actually start. It's not that I'm doing nothing. I'm thinking about it, but until I have a plan of approach, I can't actually sit down and start making a physical effort to do it.
I'm fairly certain this is why I prefer things like take-home exams. I have to create a "structure" or plan of attack for approaching my work. I have to have a virtually completed project or a good idea of what the completed project will look like before I can start working. For exams, this means I need to look at a problem and then turn ideas over in my head. After an arbitrary amount of time, I will suddenly know how to tackle it and then throw everything else I'm doing out the window in an effort to work on it. My husband always thought this was funny. I would get an exam and read it through. The next day, at dinner for instance, I would jump up and say, "I've got it," and run off to work. Then I would put a very concentrated effort toward completing things.
For this paper, I've had to plan out not only how the paper should look but also how I plan to structure my efforts. Where do I start with the research? How do I compile my information? It may sound pretty straight forward, but I find that unless I have a the big picture figured out as well as a good amount of detail about the specifics of the plan completed, I fall into a state of mental paralysis, unable to even begin because the project will seem too overwhelming.
That is one reason why I'm very excited about my dissertation project: it was very obvious to me how I would go about doing the research, including what intermediate steps I would need to take.
My husband has commented that he does things differently. He jumps in and figures out how to organize the information as he's working with it. Sometimes this means he gets part way through and then has to go back and redo things whereas I seldom find I have that problem.
We have taken classes together where we had take-home exams. Neither one of us tended finish earlier than the other, and despite our different approaches, we often got similar grades. Thus, I'm guessing that neither approach has a real obvious benefit over the other (although people's perception is often that the "doer" is doing more than the "thinker" who is organizing the project in their head).
So how do you tackle projects?