Daily Archives: October 16, 2013

Stress.

There is a term used in the athletic community called the “pain cave”. I truly enter the pain cave at least twice a week during our workouts. There are too ways to cope with the pain cave – you can let it swallow you and give up, or you can embrace it and use it to push beyond your preconceived limitations. Some enter the pain cave and exit a new person. They may be shaken for a bit, but are ultimately a stronger, more powerful individual. It hardens one’s character.

 

This is similar to stress. I have three midterms this week. Two tomorrow (Thursday) and one on Friday. I am currently in the pain cave of academia. I am stressed out. However, I try not to focus on the negatives of the stress, but rather let it push me through the week. When I am in the pain cave in the gym, I think about the outcome and I am pushed to continue fighting. I have applied this to my academic pursuits. For when the week is over, it is fall break, and I will be through my first midterms of the week, stronger and more wise because of it.

 

Stress is part of college. Stress will continue throughout life. College stress allows us to learn how to cope with it before the real world swallows us all. I, like most normal people, dislike doing the majority of my schoolwork, but I understand its importance and I try to think of the positive outcomes of my studies. To my classmates – keep calm and carry on.

-Murph

Reflections

After submitting my scholarly article analysis yesterday, I decided to make a blog post reflecting on my thoughts throughout the assignment. The article I analyzed was an article about using social networking in homework assignments. It was by Stacy Kitsis and it was called “The Facebook Generation: Homework as Social Networking.” I’ll provide a quick overview:

Kitsis notes that her students’ homework performance is dwindling due to the time restraints they have from all of their extra curricular activities. Instead of getting angry at them for not doing their work, she assigns a different type of work, homework that is online, a place where her students spend a lot of their time. She assigns both an email discussion assignment and and public blogging assignment. Her new system is very effective. Everyone is now contributing and they are contributing with quality work.

Kitsis says there are a few reasons for this rise in homework quality. The first is that students want to value what they do. If they know a teacher isn’t going to read and respond to their work, then they won’t value it. With the email discussions, each student is required to read and respond to another student, this way, everyone gets feedback and everyone values what they write.

The second reason is that students perform better when they are performing for a group of their peers. Basically, if kids know that all of their classmates will read something they write, they will put more effort into it. This is why the blogging assignment is great.

I’ve noticed the same in our class. I tend to put more effort into my blog posts, tweets, and anything that I know any or all of my classmates will read. I am also more motivated to do the work online because the internet is a cool new platform that most teachers don’t use. I don’t think I could have found an article with more stuff for me to relate to than this one. It was actually pretty fun writing my analysis paper.

Disconnected in 2013

As I watched Disconnected yesterday – on a computer in the library, I must point out – I struggled with the purpose for which someone would ever attempt to go without a computer for three weeks. The students in the movie, I think, found that over and over again they were only frustrating librarians, teachers and friends alike. In the end they simply needed to rely on others to do their computer work for them. One of the kids’ boss had to log his work hours for him, the same person had to make a friend send out an email for him, the other guy made his classmate who works at the library look up the call numbers for certain books for him, etc. Perhaps going through the process of realizing that most systems are online has value in itself, but to me it seems impossible to live without computers while being a student. It is certainly possible to take a long backpacking trip or to buy a cabin in the woods where you live happily without computers, but in the modern university it is pretty much required to have your own personal computer.

In the end these three people found that even without computers, they depended on computer systems simply to survive as a student. If someone tried to do this today, it would be even more difficult. The students in the documentary  used the typewriters available in the library to type their work, whereas today typewriters aren’t even accessible. They are fully put away, shelved, or fully trashed by 2013. One of the guys registered for classes by paper, which probably wouldn’t be possible at Middlebury anymore either, unless you wanted to get the last pick of classes or make someone to register online for you.

It is important to understand that most of our systems to make a university work depend on computers, but trying to reject computers only puts yourself at a disadvantage and inconveniences everyone around you. You don’t need a smartphone, an ipod, a camera, or an ipad, per say, but you do need to be able to use a computer, and that will never change.