Classes started again this Monday and the challenges of being a part-time student who also works 40 hours per week (commutes an additional 10 hours per week), parents a three-year-old child, and also has to make a marriage work become abundantly clear once more. When I consider that only a few years ago, really, as I was working on my MA, I could take full-time classes and work 20+ hours per week and still have free time, the additions of a child + marriage don’t seem so much on the surface but add up to a lot! My house is a mess, as I’m not a good housekeeper at the best of times, and I find myself wanting to productively procrastinate (i.e., do other things like organizing my book collection and finally getting it all on LibraryThing when I really should be doing my weekly readings instead).
I’ve been quite active online since my college days, when I’d stay up late chatting with friends and browsing the Internet on all manner of topics. It’s come as a surprise, therefore, that I find it so difficult to engage with online classes and, most troubling, how hard it is to keep a class calendar in my head. I was never good at keeping a class calendar and just remembered my class schedule and due dates through most of college and graduate school. Now, however, something about not getting the aural reminders from professors makes it that much harder. I see that I will need to drop by a bookstore at some point, buy a calendar, and physically write down everything in it, because it’s just not sticking in my head without that additional physical component of writing it out.
As someone who tends to be ridiculously organized about class work, this is a challenge for me, because I do not like feeling uncertain about what I am supposed to do when. Is this something that anyone else has found to be true about online classes that you perhaps hadn’t realized before?
And…my toddler has just come in with his airplane and is begging in a high-pitched voice “caniwatchpingu caniwatchpingu caniWATCHpingu caniwatchPINGU?” and is now climbing all over me roaring “like Simba”.
Now I have a plastic plane dangling from my head and my husband will have to chop a chunk out that is caught in the plane’s propeller. Ouch. In comparison with that, sitting down to read about Reference & Library Services or digital libraries is somehow so much less…present and painful!
