Head Office of the November Procrastinators General

[schroeder]

November thread started [√]

Complete this week's work [x]

I have done tons and tons and tons of research.

It's basically written.

So, why can't I motivate myself to finish the damn thing and put it to bed??

I can sooo identify with that feeling, fluffy. Yesterday I put off writing til 1 hr defore deadline I finally submitted it but few hours after extension deadline, but as it was in the middle of night I hope my tutor won't mind.

Proles once linked to some procrastination strategies site and they said that it's best to work in small bursts, like an hour or 30 minutes, and if you're a hopeless case then even 5 or 10 minutes followed by 10 minutes of rest will do.

WSP- glad you got extension. Now get on with it

Phew, that's it finished. 3rd assessment in 3 weeks. It's made me seriously reconsider my plan to double up next year. An overlap here of a couple of months has completely scrambled my brain.

Just need to pluck up the courage to submit now.....

best of luck to anyone still writing - I won't be back on this thread till January!

Sob. I LOATH PACE and HRA and ECHR. How can it take a WHOLE day to write two paragraphs? I mean how? Look at the statute, look at all the other statutes that add bits to that statute. Look at European conventions and case law and then look at home law oh and throw in some common law and stir in some high minded professors views alongside some lovely relevant journal articles (the ones without any pictures in them....).

Sob.

And I have no wine.

I have been reading and reading, but I'm not sure it's going in, so I have fired up the laptop in order to look at the activities I've been putting off doing.

Trouble is as soon as the old 'everything machine' is on, all self discipline goes out the window and here I am on mumsnet. I really would not do a media based course again, it's so hard for me to focus.

Deadline is the 26th.

time for

Tired and fed up. Working on TMA but my brain doesn't want to, I'm not enthused at all. Hard. Time for more

well done mustdash

kicks up the butt to everyone else

schroeder, I feel your pain. I hated hated hated the multimedia delivery of that course. Experiment with using the transcripts so you can sit away from the computer as much as possible - that's what I did in the end. I would go through the DVD stuff quickly in one or two sessions to get a feel for the room as a whole, then work from the transcripts for the detailed study and TMA prep. It's a shame because imho the course material is brilliant; I just hated the delivery.

my tutor seemed surprised that anyone would be unhappy with the format, he thinks it's great.

In his defence I suspect it's quite hard for the people teaching the course to look at it the same way as a student would.

There also seems to be an assumption that everyone studies the same way-ie with a computer on a train? It's just wrong I'm sure some people do do that, but others like me walk to work and so would appreciate more audio material and most of all books, not giant a4 folders of readings.

Anyway whinge whinge.

I really have to get on.

I know what you mean. I found it inconvenient (I like to read in bed, which is a PITA with those unwieldy folders or loose A4 pages) and it felt like they were using technology for technology's sake a bit. There's a reason the book format has been so successful over the centuries ...

Have you got a kindle (or similar device)? If you have you could convert the PDFs to read on it. I wish I'd had mine when I was doing DD306 - it would've made reading the transcripts easier (and you can annotate docs on it too).

Proles you're such a temptress I'm sposed to be washing the windows.

I do not have a kindle-and I'll tell you why, you cannot download books from the library onto a kindle. As I work at the library and hardly ever buy a book it would be daft.

I might look at some other kind of e-reader though if I get some cash for christmas/birthday, that might make things more portable for me. Not to mention the amount of time, paper and printer ink it takes to print out the transcripts.

(Do you know what the tutor said to me when I said I didn't commute? He said 'I could listen to the cd whilst doing the ironing.' Honestly I nearly fell over.

I did do some ironing yesterday as a favour to dh, who was away at the weekend, (when he usually does it) and he was made up-called me 'the ironing fairy'. )

Ironing? IRONING? I don't even know where my iron is

All the video and audio material is provided in those A4 folders, but the annoying thing is that they don't give you transcripts of the stuff on the DVD-ROM that links it all together. I tried copying pasting the DVD-ROM stuff into a document and printing it off, then inserting those pages into the appropriate places in the folders, but it was a right pain (and as you say, uses up a lot of paper and ink). In the end it felt like more hassle than it was worth to do that, so towards the end of the course I found myself making minimal use of the DVD-ROMs, and this wasn't ideal either. Without the structure provided by the DVD-ROM material, it all feels a bit like a bunch of random readings. You do need that linking material to make sense of it all don't you?

I hope I'm not being offputting with all this moaning about the format ofthe course. I found the course incredibly rewarding: it's up there in my top two OU courses. So well worth the hassle of working with the crappy multimedia delivery I think. I hope you find some way of working with the materials that works for you :)

I got my 20th C Lit tma back-crappy, but deserved mark.
Off to study-next tma due in 10 days.

WSP-hope you got some work done.

Aw winny nevermind, 1st one is always the bummer. Is it substitutable?

Not getting on so well here, will submit something today though. Can't seem to get into it yet, it seems a bit artificial. Meh. Wondering if it was such a good idea to do a level 2 and 3 course at the same time.

I'm wondering the same thing

No, the mark wasn't so bad, but the lowest for the first tma of all the courses I have done so far. Not substitutable, but will be ok if the others will be high enough.

Yeah, I hate it when you can't get into it- artificial's a good word.

Now waiting for the CW tma back- am inwardly cringing at the thought of tutor reading it- it's soooo horrible.

I cringe everytime-just imagine someone reading the crap I write. [cringe emoticom] But then I'm very cringey, I watch love scenes on the telly through my fingers and just cannot bear a moment of jeremy kyle and his ilk.

Winny, the 1st one is always the worst isn't it? (except someone on my last course who got 85 for her first one ) Like you said if the rest are better it will get knocked out of the calculation and it won't matter.

Here I am again on mumsnet when I should be studying!

I do the same with love scenes.

I got 83 for the the first tma last year on A316. It quickly went downhill from there, though, with me not submitting 2 tmas at all

Right, I better get on with it and stop checking whether the CW tma has been marked every 5 minutes

Oh God I've got that thing where you think you've been just, you know, procrastinating, and then you start to do it, and you suddenly think shit I don't know what the hell I'm talking about it, this is going to be crap, why didn't start ages ago so I could think it through...

Yep. Same here. Exactly the same.

Oh that feeling

It's the fear of that feeling that makes me procrastinate in the first place. Kind of a self fulfilling prophecy though isn't it. Have a and power through it.

then looks at TMA question-WTAF!

When is it due, schroeder?

For a minute then I thought you were being rude about my tum!

My TMA is not due until the 26th and I'm not feeling too bad about it really. (yet)

The above is just a illustration of my normal pattern of behavior. In solidarity IYKWIM.

Epic fail, as the kids would say.

26th-plenty of time! Mine is due next Friday. Haven't done any reading yet.

WSP-did you submit yours? Are you a bit happier about it? Also, I wanted to ask you whether on the A215 tma they tell you the percentage you got for the freewrite, fiction and commentary each?

Haven't submitted yet . 500 words written out of 1000 so far.

Winny you do get the marks for each question on the score sheet at the beginning where the tutors comments are. I got 10/10 for the freewrite but hum well room for improvement with the actual prose bit heh heh.

Ok I have 1000 words now, but its's lumpy, good in bits and padded out in others, some bits sound like its going to lead somewhere but I don't expand on them, others are irrelevant to the question, other bits are just plain boring. I don't have a proper conclusion and it kind of peters out. But I have to submit by tonight. And I'm fed up now.