There are many different things that are currently hindering me from performing well. The reasons are different depending on the subject I am talking about. The medium of the work also affects it. Hopefully I can fix some of these problems soon.
Procrastination is my biggest problem and has always affected me. I’ve tried different ways to fight this, but none of them worked well. I’ve tried to schedule writing papers ahead of time, but that just made me procrastinate more. Another solution I’ve tried is to write the paper over an extended time length. This caused problems as ideas didn’t really flow well, I forgot to include necessary parts of the assignment, and I still tended to write over 75% of the paper on the night before it was due. I’ve tried to go to the library, free from computers and television, but that just made me waste time as I made extremely little progress on my reports. I just can’t seem to easily keep my attention on an assignment for an extended period of time. I guess that would also count as a time management issue, since I cannot seem to properly schedule a time for work and stick to it.
In class there are a couple of things that are hindering me. I am taking a class about government, which has the exact same subject matter as a class that I took in my junior year of high school. I don’t have anything against the teacher or the material, but I just can’t seem to find the repeated facts interesting in class and this makes the textbook boring to read. I also tend to fall asleep in some classes for extremely short periods of time. I think this is more from lack of sleep than anything else, so sleeping earlier should fix that problem. English and Philosophy present problems for me for the same reason. I don’t really understand poetry very well and have a hard time writing about it. I also have a very hard time understanding the concepts in philosophy. I’m not really used to the subjects talked about in that class and most of it goes over my head. Art History is different, I honestly came to the class with no interest in art. I also can’t seem to learn from the teacher’s teaching style. Memorizing all the times, dates, styles, and artists is very difficult. I am slightly off, but being slightly off is entirely incorrect. Some professors also have an attitude that makes learning difficult.
Presentations are a large part of my problem. I have always had problems with them and my solutions tend to cause other problems in a circular pattern. I have always been poor at social skills and that carries over into speech giving. I talk quietly and don’t maintain eye contact with the person I’m talking to so I have a difficult time maintaining eye contact with an entire audience. I have a bad memory so I’ll write things down on notes, but holding the note removes my ability to make gestures, and has me constantly looking down at it breaking eye contact completely and further reducing the volume. If I try to give a presentation without it, I get nervous and forget lines and tend to stutter adding in “umms” and forgetting whole portions entirely. Being in front of an audience makes me nervous and I tend to freeze up. In grade school I used to have a twitch and that caused problems and comments from the teachers. I also tend to skew time terribly, I can’t take into account my pace when giving the speech and tend speed up the pace as the speech goes on which causes me to fall very short of the time period. On rare occasions though all the awkward pauses put me over the time limit, but this isn’t very common.
Another thing that I have a problem with is online submittals. Coming to Baruch is the first time I’ve handed in papers over the internet. Before coming here all my assignments were handed in in-person at the set class time. Electronic submittal has some problems. Sometimes the papers are due at a certain time at a certain date and I forgot the time limit. Other times I could make a mistake and send it to the wrong source. Otherwise I have no problems with electronic submittal.
These are all of the problems that are hindering me from doing well in class. Hopefully I can combat these problems and come up with working solutions to them as time goes on.
