Famous Last Words Week 8

This weekend marks the end of week 8…how crazy is that? The semester is officially halfway over! This week has been a little different, both in terms of this class and life in general. In this class, week 8 was a review week. It took a little extra time to get adjusted to the different assignments this week, but I feel like the assignments themselves actually took less time, so nothing was a problem there. I liked the reflection assignments and thought it was fun to look back on how much I’ve accomplished for this class already. Also, I enjoyed writing and reading thank you posts to other students. I don’t think the online format of this class would work as well without the steady stream of comments from other students who are doing the same thing. Going back and commenting on the Famous Last Words assignments of other students made me realize I haven’t written up a Famous Last Words in a couple of weeks, so I decided to.

The fact that the semester is halfway over is both relieving and scary. For one, this means that midterm exam period is upon us and I’ve been pretty stressed out with my schoolwork lately. As I’ve said before, I’m in 6 classes this semester. I generally like my classes, but it’s a lot to stay on top of. I have a few papers due in the near future and while I’ve been chipping away at them, I’ve been struggling to sit down and accomplish big chunks at once.

All of my friends from home have been rubbing their fall breaks in my face, which is a little saddening. Most of them get two of three days off, which is something I wish we were allowed to have here. I know we unofficially get one day for OU/TX, but I don’t have class on Friday so that doesn’t help me much. Even though we don’t get a fall break, we have been getting some “fall” weather. I put fall in quotation marks because weather people consider cool or fallish here is completely different than cool/fallish weather at home. Still, I’ll take what I can get.

(An Indiana fall, Flickr.com)

Week 8 Reading Diary: Self-Assessment

I reread the instructions for reading diary posts and I feel pretty confident that my reading diaries are on the right track. In the beginning, my reading diaries were longer, but they were a lot more summary-based than anything. I took notes on every story, but my notes were basically a quick rundown of the plot. They didn’t necessarily include my thoughts or opinions on the stories.

I have a pretty straightforward method. I’m big on establishing routine and I try to do so whenever I can. Every week, when it’s time to do a reading diary, I sit down, open a word document, and pull up the unit I’m reading. Since the stories are normally pretty short, I find it most convenient to read the entire story and then write about it if I choose to. I pick the number of stories I’m going to write about based on the number of stories in the unit/the number of stories I read for the week. Stories I choose to make notes about are usually ones that I saw something I enjoyed in. Recently, I’ve also been picking stories to make notes about based on whether or not I’d be interested in using them for my storytelling post.

I don’t think I’ve included an image in my reading diary posts yet. I find that it is kind of unnecessary, especially considering that the reading diaries always link back to the stories in the Un-Textbook and those stories usually have images. I could be a little more detailed in my reading diary posts. Sometimes I don’t find myself having a lot to say. Other times, I find myself saying a lot of repetitive things, so I can definitely try to be better about that. However, I feel I have the reading diary system under control, which is good because it’s the 8^th week!