Maths and me

They don’t mix. At least not any more. I’m really wondering what went wrong between primary school and now. Back in primary school I got the best maths marks the school had seen in years. By secondary school I had come up against a few people better than me, but I was still in the top 5 or 10 in the school as far as grades go. In college I remained in the top groups, but general laziness meant I fell down to a B grade. But now… I have no clue what the lecturer is even talking about with this stuff. Just looking at these formulas and calculations makes my brain want to cry and go cut it’s metaphorical wrists in the corner. Half of it isn’t even any harder than the college stuff either, but I don’t remember a thing from college after a year anyway.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. I think I’ve actually got stupider since secondary school. I may have been force fed some morsels of knowledge and tasty facts since then, but I seem to have lost the core ability to learn, understand, and work things out.

I don’t know. It’s hard to say how much of this stuff is talent, and how much is effort and hard work. I certainly haven’t been doing much of the latter, I’m just not sure if I still have the former.

To sum it up, this is pretty much how I feel about maths right now -

I am very tempted to write/draw something like that in the exam, in fact.

Anyway, Heroes is on now, and I’ve finally remembered to actually turn on the TV when it’s on for once, rather than watching it online a day later. So, I’m going to go watch it now.

If sleep is for the weak, then call me weak

I’m getting a bit tired of being nocturnal now.

It wasn’t exactly intentional, but I’ve got stuck in a really bad pattern of sleeping in the past week or so. As I mentioned in my last post, I found that the on;y time I could make any progrss with my coursework was at the last possible moment, the night before it was due in. With a few pieces of coursework due in the space of a week, I ended up pulling a few too many all-nighters.

Thing is, by the time this was done, I was stuck in a habit of going to bed at 6-10am, and getting up at 2-6pm. That is not good.

I tried to get out of it. But I’m not good with alarms. I’ve been known to turn off alarms in my sleep without realising. I’ve often slept through alarms set for classes or work. So now that I’m going into 2 weeks with no specific schedule, an alarm set for the morning, making irritating noises at me after 4 hours sleep, does nothing. I’ll hit it repeatedly for about half an hour to make it snooze, and eventually it’ll either give up on me, or I’ll find the button that turns it off. Or knock it off the desk.

I even tried skipping sleep one night (or day) and staying up until the next night. Somehow though, after being tired all day, by the time it got to 10pm, I wasn’t tired. In the end, I still stayed up fairly late (though not as late as I had been lately). Thing is, apparently my sleep just added up, because I then somehow slept for around 14 hours, and still woke up at 4pm.

I think my body’s just given up on sleeping now though. I wasn’t paricularly tired last night. I slept for a few hours this morning, but just kinda rolled around half asleep for most of it. Then I got up, sat around for a bit, went out. Now I’m a bit tired and feeling quite lazy, but I tried laying down and didn’t fall asleep.

Life without sleep would be very convenient. There aren’t enough hours in the day for life. Or at least not for procrastinating about life.

I don’t really have much else to say at the moment. This has been an incredibly uneventful week (as always), so I guess I’ll leave it at that.

So, blogs

I have one of those things, huh?

“Why haven’t you blogged in a month!?” I hear you all (mostly James) cry. Why indeed. I suppose I could say I’ve been too busy, or I’ve had nothing to say. Neither of which would be entirely true, but at least some sort of “fuzzy true” which allows them to be somewhat relevant to the subject. They are at least 0.5 true, perhaps.

I suppose the fact that I’m referencing my studies means I am actually doing some, although still probably still not as much as I should. Since coming back to college after easter, I had a deluge of coursework rain down upon me, much like the water than was simultaneously raining down on me at every single moment for almost every day in March. Ever present and really frustrating.

Unfortunately that’s where the similarity between coursework and english rain ends. While the rain just sort of drips down on you, generally annoying you at a fairly constant rate, my coursework suddenly jumps up and punches me in the face, much like some drunken chav who thinks you stole their hat. That does lead me to believe that perhaps I DID steal my lecturers hat, as the force behind the coursework’s punch was pretty heavy.

It’s entirely self-inflicted though. I’ve known right from the start of the year that there’d be a large amount of deadlines within a few weeks at the end of the year, and I’d been set all but one of those before easter. I then had 5 weeks to procrastinate, sleep, and generally do any activity but work over easter. To be fair, I did spend the majority of those 3 weeks staying with friends and without the time or resources to do any work, but once I got to my parents house, I indulged in absolute laziness for 2 weeks.

When I returned to college and suddenly realised I had a programming project and a maths paper due in the next week, and an essay the week after, I paniced a bit. I had no idea how to do half of it. My worries were at least relieved a bit when I discovered that neither did anyone else. For the programming project we’d been set the task of creating a network based voting system. Not an overly complex concept, but when you consider that weeks earlier we’d been making relatively simple programs to count the number of words in a document, it is. Especially when you consider that we really haven’t been taught networking very well (or, at all). To put it in real world terms, it’s like a baby going from being taught to walk, to being taught to a backwards triple somersault. By someone with no legs.

Along with being a generally incompetent lecturer with the teaching skills of a oxygen-deprived monkey, it appears that he doesn’t even know how to program himself. While considered “generally a nice guy” by those in his tutor group, he manages to surpass his incompetency in every lecture. Last week, he showed us a diagram that proved that the internet does in fact, DO SOMETHING.

Maybe it’s not his fault. Maybe the university has hastily thrown him into a role that he’s not ready for. But as he’s in charge of one of the subjects, I have to think that he must be adequately qualified to teach these things. In one programming example he gave us, he gave us some code that didn’t actually work. A group of us spend 3 days trying to work out how to get this code to work, because we needed to understand it to the project. After eventually giving up on it and searching the internet, I actually came across the code he’d given us. It wasn’t code he’d written at all, he’d taken it off of some website. What’s worse is, he didn’t even copy it correctly. He copied about half of it, then threw together some of his own code, which didn’t work at all. When confronted about this, his reply was “Well, I’m still learning too”. When I paid £3000 to come to university, I expected to be taught by professionals, and not have to find out all I need to know on the internet (Which I could have just done by staying at home)

I suppose I should cut him some slack here since his background is in business, not computing, but if this is the case, then why is he teaching a module which involves a large amount of programming. I still can’t quite decide if it is because the university made him teach something he doesn’t understand, or if he does actually know the subject and is just an awful teacher. Even when it is a subject that’s supposed to be his area of expertise though, he’s no good at teaching it. When he has an hour to go through a 20 slide presentation, he usually gets through around 10.

It appears that, as usual, I have rambled on for far longer than intended about a subject I didn’t really mean to talk about. To cut a long story short, we all complained that we hadn’t been taught the coursework material, and the deadline was extended. By the time we actually got our head around the code which he apparently couldn’t, it was actually relatively simple.

The real problems began when we were set a massive team project with only 2 weeks to complete it, including complicated programming, a design document, and a presentation. It’s a bit odd when you get 5 weeks to write a 2000 word essay, but only 2 weeks to do the biggest project of the year. I guess that’s part of the challenge. Fortunately I ended up with a good team, and one of the few where everyone actually did work. But with this short deadline and 3 others creeping up on me, I ended up with a pretty hectic few weeks.

I’ve discovered (or at least, proven) that I can only do work when a deadline is so close it could head butt me. For 3 out of 4 of those deadlines I was working on the coursework all night, and finished around 6-8am the day that it was due in (and had to be handed in by 12pm). Having made the mistake before of trying to take a nap before then (and sleeping past the deadline), I ended up staying up until the university was open so I could go and hand it in. I then came back, collapsed, and slept most of the day. The only reason I didn’t make it 4/4 on all-nighters on deadlines was because I couldn’t really make the rest of the group work on my weird schedule. Though I did actually do the majority of my individual work towards it the night before we were having a team meeting, finishing it at 9am before the 10am meeting.

In the end though, it all worked out fine, and I got the work done. So now I’ve done all of my coursework for the year, and I’m relaxing… for now. But with exams only a month away, I’ll probably be back to panic stations pretty soon.

(Woo, 1200 words…)