School

[lemur68]

My head is just not in it this quarter. The work is getting tougher and I don't seem to have the concentration to do it. I don't know if I just need a break (I attended in the summer, so I haven't had more than five weeks off since I started in fall '06) or if I'm reaching the point where I just can't hack it; whether I'm tired or just a Bad

Comments

[drexle]

There's another thing that they don't teach you in school, and indeed that usually you only realize once it happens. Sometimes all it takes to solve a problem is to stop thinking about it for a little bit. This tends to happen after your knowledge base has expanded farther than you realize it has, and you've spent hours driving your RC car into the wall and you realize that you need to change the batteries. All of a sudden you'll *see* the different way to tackle the problem in a flash of insight.

Short answer: Good news, breaks help. Bad news, until you know more, the breaks would be best spent trying to tackle a different problem that requires different tools as a means to expand your knowledge.

[mandroid2000]

One thing that sometimes worked for me, back when I started to burn out on school, was integrating independent learning with the required coursework.

For instance, I hated chemistry but I loved learning anything about the marine and aquatic sciences. If there was a chapter of chemistry about something I found terribly boring and drab, I'd go online or head to the library and try to find some way for what I had to learn and what I was interested in to intersect. It turns out that a lot of really cool chemistry professors and instructors have designed web pages for their students that often made more sense to me than what my instructor was conveying to our class. Sometimes a museum would have an animated video online. Maybe reading "Cartoon Guide to Chemistry" would make me understand