Autopsy
Spoken as I handed in my final exam to my organic chem prof last night:
Me: "The course was brutal, but I enjoyed it anyway. So either you're a good prof, or I have Stockholm syndrome."
Paul: *laughs* "Probably a bit of both."
I'm annoyed that I didn't do better in this class. Getting a mediocre grade in a subject that bores me and is taught by a prof that sucks is one thing, but getting one in a subject that actually excites my interest and is taught by a prof who knows what he's doing and does it well is another. I got what I needed out of the class, even if it doesn't especially look like it on paper -- it got me to the point where I can continue learning it on my own, and intend to.
Here's my analysis of what my grade died of:
I'm apt to get fixated on aspects of the subject that are peripheral to where my marks are going to come from. For example, I got really interested in the physics behind NMR and IR spectroscopy, but what we got tested on was ability to treat the spectral readouts as a black box and just use them to deduce molecular structure in a rule-based manner. I'd done enough to get the idea pretty quickly; it's just that after that initial "aha" the appeal of solving what amounts to chemical sudoku puzzles drops off fairly sharply and I find myself wanting to sink my teeth into more fundamental stuff. For whatever reason, I can't just take things for granted like some other people seem to be able to -- if I don't understand what's going on physically, it drives me nuts. The downside of this is that the attention that could be going to learning routines that'll get me easy marks ends up going instead to grappling with hard stuff that I won't get any medium-term reward for.
What's worse, the fact that I know the stuff I'm spending most of my brain cycles on is intrinsically worthwhile allows me to effortlessly rationalize blowing off other things, like lab reports. What I don't think about when I'm in the zone is that everything else suffers for it later: when the hammer of a deadline or a test inevitably comes down on me I let the chronic guilt and anxiety over what I've blown off get in the way of doing other important things -- and since then the problem has spread beyond the course material to infect my entire state of mind, a problem in one course reverberates into the others and into my personal life. So I end up feeling lousy and doing lousy at everything, which perversely makes me retreat further into the stuff that makes me happy but is also what got me into the mess in the first place.
This year really brought out just how badly this kind of psychological interference throws off my flow, and once lost it's hard to get back. Switching to courses where there is no appreciable divide between theory and practice -- where the impulse to dig deeper will actually help more than hurt me -- will improve this situation, but I need an internal realignment to match the external one. It's imperative that I get better at avoiding these traps, but it's probably best to split that thought off to a separate post.
Me: "The course was brutal, but I enjoyed it anyway. So either you're a good prof, or I have Stockholm syndrome."
Paul: *laughs* "Probably a bit of both."
I'm annoyed that I didn't do better in this class. Getting a mediocre grade in a subject that bores me and is taught by a prof that sucks is one thing, but getting one in a subject that actually excites my interest and is taught by a prof who knows what he's doing and does it well is another. I got what I needed out of the class, even if it doesn't especially look like it on paper -- it got me to the point where I can continue learning it on my own, and intend to.
Here's my analysis of what my grade died of:
I'm apt to get fixated on aspects of the subject that are peripheral to where my marks are going to come from. For example, I got really interested in the physics behind NMR and IR spectroscopy, but what we got tested on was ability to treat the spectral readouts as a black box and just use them to deduce molecular structure in a rule-based manner. I'd done enough to get the idea pretty quickly; it's just that after that initial "aha" the appeal of solving what amounts to chemical sudoku puzzles drops off fairly sharply and I find myself wanting to sink my teeth into more fundamental stuff. For whatever reason, I can't just take things for granted like some other people seem to be able to -- if I don't understand what's going on physically, it drives me nuts. The downside of this is that the attention that could be going to learning routines that'll get me easy marks ends up going instead to grappling with hard stuff that I won't get any medium-term reward for.
What's worse, the fact that I know the stuff I'm spending most of my brain cycles on is intrinsically worthwhile allows me to effortlessly rationalize blowing off other things, like lab reports. What I don't think about when I'm in the zone is that everything else suffers for it later: when the hammer of a deadline or a test inevitably comes down on me I let the chronic guilt and anxiety over what I've blown off get in the way of doing other important things -- and since then the problem has spread beyond the course material to infect my entire state of mind, a problem in one course reverberates into the others and into my personal life. So I end up feeling lousy and doing lousy at everything, which perversely makes me retreat further into the stuff that makes me happy but is also what got me into the mess in the first place.
This year really brought out just how badly this kind of psychological interference throws off my flow, and once lost it's hard to get back. Switching to courses where there is no appreciable divide between theory and practice -- where the impulse to dig deeper will actually help more than hurt me -- will improve this situation, but I need an internal realignment to match the external one. It's imperative that I get better at avoiding these traps, but it's probably best to split that thought off to a separate post.