So since the first reflection, I have felt pretty up and down about my work and effort, not only in this course but across all of my courses. The main thing that has been plaguing me is just a lack of motivation in the last 2 weeks for all my classes. I’m in the process of getting back into a groove and getting my work done but I think that the semester and online learning are taking a much larger toll on me than I originally anticipated. I think my main issue overall has just been I let myself fall into bad habits and have been prioritizing the wrong things and just need to shift my focus back onto my work and classes which I think I’m on the path to doing which I am happy about.
Specifically for this course, I have been up and down since my first reflection as I said before. After the first reflection, I was really motivated and felt like I was doing some of my best work, I was really engaged with the material and with my classmates, I began to start leaving comments on the materials for the week and really felt as if I was getting something out of doing that and hoped that I added something to my peers reading experience if they saw my notes. Then I would say 2-3 weeks ago a lot of my classes came crashing down on me work-wise resulting in a very work-heavy week, a lighter workload week, and then a final third week that was just a monster, which happened to be this last week.
What ended up happening was in that first week I shifted my focus away from fully absorbing the materials a little bit and just focused on getting my work out, then the lighter week I kind of just lost motivation weirdly. I was burnt out from the previous week and dreading the upcoming week resulting in me pushing things off more and more, I didn’t really interact with the materials in a meaningful way at all which I was disappointed in myself with. Then this last week, the monster of a week, I was playing catch up I had all this work and studying to do but I had to catch up on materials ad reintegrate myself which was just super challenging to do. To improve in this aspect I just need to get back on the metaphorical horse and get back into my old groove, I think this should be really possible as I am really motivated to do so now and my schedule has died down a bit for the rest of the semester. I just need to get back to diving into the material, reading it thoroughly, and really connecting to it than using this connection to help myself better understand and my peers through commenting.
Writing posts like this and the weekly posts where I get to apply my knowledge may be the most beneficial and liberating format of learning I have had so far in my academic career. I really feel like the reduced pressure of the posts and the ability to make the posts really however you want and allowing for a greater degree of creativity is liberating. I feel like I get so much more out of it rather than a large essay say after 4-6 weeks, as having to write about what I learned for that week then reinforcing it through comments on my peers’ posts really imbeds the information in my brain. I have found the weekly posts and commenting not only less stressful compared to traditional essays but also more beneficial to my learning.
