i'm not good at studying. plain homework i can handle, paperwriting and necessary research and whatnot, fine. but studying, sitting down and going over material covered earlier, rereading notes, the like. i get bored and my mind wanders, i start downloading music or picking my nose or calling my boyfriend, and before i know it the test is tomorrow. in the past, that actually wasn't a problem; i made it through all of high school and two years of college without truly studying probably more than a half dozen times. the only one i can specifically recall is for my psychology exam my freshman year at drexel.
i suspect that i won't be able to get away with that here. the pure volume of information is just too high, and while we are learning it pretty much as experientially as possible, you sort of have to memorize the parts of a flower and then eventually really know them. though the flower parts i'm good on - it's the plant names i need to work on. harder because it isn't just cholla, which i can recognize, it's whipple cholla. not just manzanita but point-leaf manzanita, englemann prickly pear, velvet ash. some of them are intuitive enough - mountain mahogony, arizona rose - but then there's fendler ceanothus, and snowberrry, which is a perfectly descriptive name for the month-and-a-half of the year when the bush actually has berries. the rest of the time, it's deciduous-simple-opposite and the foliage can take at least three different forms on the same bush. on the same branch, actually, which is the only way that the professor was able to convince us that we were looking at one plant. not to mention all the cell parts, biochemical interactions, etc etc etc.
it isn't a complaint, really. i can't believe how good it feels to have my brain working again. i think i'm just going to have to put more effort than i was expecting to into changing my habits, which is okay.
on the up side, until i get good at focusing and studying, i'm going to have a very clean apartment, because cleaning is the distraction i tend to feel least guilty about. today i even mopped.
i suspect that i won't be able to get away with that here. the pure volume of information is just too high, and while we are learning it pretty much as experientially as possible, you sort of have to memorize the parts of a flower and then eventually really know them. though the flower parts i'm good on - it's the plant names i need to work on. harder because it isn't just cholla, which i can recognize, it's whipple cholla. not just manzanita but point-leaf manzanita, englemann prickly pear, velvet ash. some of them are intuitive enough - mountain mahogony, arizona rose - but then there's fendler ceanothus, and snowberrry, which is a perfectly descriptive name for the month-and-a-half of the year when the bush actually has berries. the rest of the time, it's deciduous-simple-opposite and the foliage can take at least three different forms on the same bush. on the same branch, actually, which is the only way that the professor was able to convince us that we were looking at one plant. not to mention all the cell parts, biochemical interactions, etc etc etc.
it isn't a complaint, really. i can't believe how good it feels to have my brain working again. i think i'm just going to have to put more effort than i was expecting to into changing my habits, which is okay.
on the up side, until i get good at focusing and studying, i'm going to have a very clean apartment, because cleaning is the distraction i tend to feel least guilty about. today i even mopped.
