Exercise Prompt: With a paper and pen, crayons, or colored markers, ask yourself what stops you from starting and progressing and finishing a piece of writing. Draw your obstacles (no matter how rough or sketchy they look!). Some may come from the world around you- like a lack of time or bad vibes from friends, teachers or bosses. Some may seem to be deeply rooted inside you, like worries about perfection. As much as possible, stay in the mindset of free-writing so the drawings come intuitively from deep inside, not from what you think you ought to draw. When you have drawn your gallery of obstacles, give each one a name. Then go to your blog and write about what you have discovered.
Above is my drawn out obstacle course to finishing assignments. When I read what we were supposed to do this week I automatically though of creating a course. The green flag is the start and the checkered is the finish. But in between those I have little red flags that mean I stop becasue of each designated issue that I come upon during many writing assignments. I was able to come up with seven different obstacles of mine. They are:
1. Feeling lack of not only time but energy (becasue I am consistently busy and hardly have either of them, although school and work is priority.)
2. Work (I work five days a week)
3. Other homework (As we all know, this can be an onstacale for every student if you are taking other courses.)
4. Perfection Issues (I have a tendency to want my work perfect. I don't like to do things wrong and get bad grades, it's better to know you did it and tried your hardest the fist time.)
5. Assignment Clarity (Sometimes I have problems with what the assignment is asking for.)
6. Communication With Classmates/Teachers (If I have questions or we are assigned to a group to do the assignment, it can be a struggle to get the information needed to finish the assignment.)
7. Unclear Study Material (I can sometimes struggle with what we are studying and not understand the information correctly.)
After doing this exercise and writing down and identifying my obstacles, I feel it is going to be easier to work around them and problem solve the issues. That way I can successfully complete all writing assignments.
Dani, I liked your drawing. The obstacle course is a good way to get your point across. I, like you struggle with trying to be clear on the class deadlines and what assignments are do and when. I don't think they are written as clear as they could be and there is no consistency between classes, which I suppose is the same as campus classes. I think something that has worked well for me is there are four of us up here in the same classes and we talk all the time so if I don't know then one of the others most likely will. I just wanted to say your blog is done well and your posts in our other classes are also well written, so keep it up. We'll all get through this.
ReplyDeleteI love your drawing. It's a race track! I have similar constraints to writing. Time, Energy and lots of homework. How did you do on the free writing assignment? I have a hard time writing cause my mind seems to go blank when I get ready to write. I don't seem to have a problem talking. ;)
ReplyDeleteWith such a busy schedule, time management is so important. Sounds like you're doing a great job managing all of it! Great Blog!!