When studying Tuesday night for my aerodynamics exam yesterday, I found it extremely difficult to study precisely because my performance was extremely important. Pressure actually made the process of learning more stressful and therefore made me more likely to procrastinate. This is a disturbing behavior but not a new ones. I experienced it earlier this semester, and frequently during my time at Purdue.
Pressure depends heavily on the amount of time remaining before the deadline. I experienced significantly less pressure when reviewing on Sunday afternoon, despite the fact that I was, at that time, less prepared. The impact of this exam upon my grade has been fixed since under-performing of the first midterm and lab report.
As I see it, there are three way to attack this problem:
- Do more of the focused work before pressure builds
- Reduce the perceived pressure of individual assignments
- Improve focus overall
Unfortunately, none of these are easy fixes. Doing work beforehand requires the cooperation of parents and professors--both notorious for doing everything in their power to prevent routine. Individual assignments would be less stressful if I were doing well overall, but that would require more work time. See #1. Attempts at improving focus have, so far, been met with limited success.
This feeds into the larger problem of...something I'm not sure I have a name for. The phenomena where I notice a mistake or failure mode but can't correct it until a term set by outside entities comes to an end. An example would be the housing complex I lived in last year: entirely unsuitable to my needs, but locked into the contract unless we forfeited a sum of money my parents were unable to pay. So I drove home each weekend of the spring semester and waited it out.
A similar dynamic arises with classes. For various reasons I find that the class is not working out for me, and am essentially unable to do anything about it without adding a year to my program. Dropping classes has never been a real possibility for financial reasons alone, which makes me all the more frustrated when professors a) fail to state their expectations clearly b) set their expectations way to high c) have expectations at all but no plans to teach.
My aerodynamics story has a happy ending: the exam went really well. After the first one it was clear that most questions are lifted directly from the textbook with only small changes, so finding the relevant example is half the work. (Aerodynamics exams are open book.) But on the whole this semester has been pushing against a brick wall. No amount of BRUTE STRENGTH will get around the two-sided job of conceptual communication. I'm willing to do my part. But a lot of educators don't seem willing to do theirs.
This feeds into the larger problem of...something I'm not sure I have a name for. The phenomena where I notice a mistake or failure mode but can't correct it until a term set by outside entities comes to an end. An example would be the housing complex I lived in last year: entirely unsuitable to my needs, but locked into the contract unless we forfeited a sum of money my parents were unable to pay. So I drove home each weekend of the spring semester and waited it out.
A similar dynamic arises with classes. For various reasons I find that the class is not working out for me, and am essentially unable to do anything about it without adding a year to my program. Dropping classes has never been a real possibility for financial reasons alone, which makes me all the more frustrated when professors a) fail to state their expectations clearly b) set their expectations way to high c) have expectations at all but no plans to teach.
My aerodynamics story has a happy ending: the exam went really well. After the first one it was clear that most questions are lifted directly from the textbook with only small changes, so finding the relevant example is half the work. (Aerodynamics exams are open book.) But on the whole this semester has been pushing against a brick wall. No amount of BRUTE STRENGTH will get around the two-sided job of conceptual communication. I'm willing to do my part. But a lot of educators don't seem willing to do theirs.
