The Past 6 Weeks

The main thing that has been troubling me over the last 6 weeks is staying motivated about school.  It has really been hard for me to stay focused because so much of my free time has been consumed by school.  I have no free time anymore, whenever I think about doing something different (other than school), there is this little guy tapping me on my shoulder saying, "Tuesday night is the deadline, and you need to get your work done, or you know what will happen, you will be a failure".  Fatigue is starting to set in and it is starting to worry me a little.  The classes are not getting any easier, and mentally, I am really starting to get tired and frustrated, with struggling to get my work in on time, without compromising the quality of it.  I keep reminding myself as to the reason I embarked on this journey in the first place, even that tactic is starting to get old.  But it is keeping me going, along with my determination to see this to the end.  Besides that, I don't see my life getting any better without a good education.  I don't have any quality free time anyway, so what the heck.  I will make this happen.

How is school influencing my life.

I think that school is influencing my life in a positive way.  Before I started going back to school, everyday of my adult life seemed to be wasted, because it always consisted of going to work just to pay bills and nothing else.  It felt as if I was just lost in the shuffle, with no sense of direction or purpose in my life.  But now that I am in school, with a goal of making a better, more productive life for myself, I can now say that I have a sense of purpose and direction in my life.  I no longer wake up everyday and ask myself, "Why don't you do something better with your life", because I am doing just that, and I feel great about taking charge of my life and moving in a positive direction.  Of all the things that can go wrong in this world, you can never go wrong by furthering your education.

What I think of Plagiarism.

I have my thoughts on plagiarism, and for the most part they are not very good.  I understand that credit has to be given to the original author, but when you are trying to give credit and can still be "charged" with plagiarism, I don't think that is right.  If you have read chapter 13b, page 240, it is saying that if you make an attempt at paraphrasing, and included an in-text citation, if the paraphrase is not considered a "legal" one, it would still be considered plagiarizing.  So, for this reason I don't let plagiarism preoccupy my mind when I am writing, the thought is still there, I just don't constantly think about it.  If I plagiarize because of bad paraphrasing, or because of too many quotes, or for whatever reason, I'll just do my best to correct the problem and move on.  I know, and even the faculty might know that it wasn't intentional.  Like the policy states, ignorance is no excuse.  I would like to know how you all feel about it.

Being an online Student

Being an online student has its advantages and disadvantages, though I think the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages. I like the informal setting, or atmosphere that comes with being an online student. You can just sit at home in front of the computer with your meal sitting in front of you, eating while you are studying. You don’t have to wake up in the morning and rush to get yourself ready for classes, or having to worry about the morning commute to school. You can basically study at your own pace, during whatever hours are convenient for you. The disadvantages are that you can’t meet your peers personally, or your instructor. The opportunity to know someone personally is not available to you in the online classroom. So you really don’t know anyone that you’re interacting with online. You can’t hang out with each other after class, so to speak. My idea to create a closer class community is to have seminars using video conferencing. Of course, we would all need to have webcams in order to make this happen, but it would alleviate a lot of the anonymity. This anonymity is really the only thing I don’t like about the online classroom setting. Have any of you ever tried to contact your financial aid officer? It is almost impossible to reach him/her. Email is usually the best way to contact them. Not being able to walk into an office and sit down in front of an advisor to discuss whatever it is that needs to be taken care of is another disadvantage. But, like I said before, the good far outweighs the bad, in my opinion. What do you guys think?

What A Day!

I'm starting to get a little more comfortable with this blogging thing day by day.  Any way, my day has been a little stressful so far.  I work nights, so I get home at about 8:00 this morning, very tired mind you, I take a shower, check my email, eat a small breakfast, then go to bed, by this time it's 9:00.  At about 1:00 this afternoon, the phone rings, at first I don't get up to answer it, if it was important they would leave a message and I would check the messages when I get up.  But then the phone starts to ring again, so I figured that it must be important, I get up to answer it and it's my mom's next door neighbor, she's telling me that..., to make a long story short, my mom is diabetic, and she has something that makes her shake a lot, it's not Parkinson's disease, but her hands shake really bad, and she's not very steady on her feet, she's also 70 years old, so I'm keeping a close eye on her.  But it was something the neighbor said that made it seem like it was urgent that I get over there (to mom's house) to see her.  I didn't ask any questions, I immediately hung up the phone, got dressed, and drove over there, trying to stay calm.  It wasn't nearly as urgent as the neighbor made it sound.  Any way, here I am still trying to calm down, mad as hell at that neighbor for being so melodramatic (I appreciate her helping me out with my mom, I really do), now I can't get back to sleep, and I have to leave for work tonight at 9:00.  I just figured that since I'm awake, I would post something on my blog.  Just wanted to vent a little; did I just officially post my first blog?  Have a good day everybody!