Works sucks like a lolly would in an act of revenge

Time for my not so daily blog that I currently feel the need to write. Right now. Thirty minu­tes before a lec­ture begins. In the recent week I have been trying to come to terms with the con­cept of work, how it should be done, when it should be done and how often I should be doing it. Then there is the ques­tion of “volume” — how much of it am I getting.

In my first year I am doing either six or eight modu­les, I think. It all seems very unc­lear. Like a hazy mist of unc­lea­ri­ness. They each have their own won­der­ful tit­les, such as: “Maths for Engi­neers”, “Engi­nee­ring Mecha­nics”, “Fluids and Energy” and “Elec­tri­cal and Elec­tro­nic Sys­tems”. I have upto eight lec­tu­res a week and then addi­tio­nal lab work and a field trip to a Jaguar manu­fac­tu­ring plant for a “Pro­fes­sio­nal Stu­dies” case study which will count to final cre­dit. Since tues­day I haven’t really done much, my busy lec­ture days being mon­day and fri­day and the lab work not star­ting til thurs­day of next week. Thus I have been con­tem­pla­ting doing the work I have been set.

Sun­day; I wor­ked four or five hours doing mathe­ma­tics func­tion revi­sion. Easy basic stuff like the inverse of a func­tion, dra­wing func­tions, one to one and map­pings etc… . I also spent some time doing nine­teen Eng Mech SQ ques­tions as more revi­sion. This stuff was ok, the gene­ric question-answer for­mula works fine with me.

After lec­tu­res on mon­day — a Maths one whe­rein the lec­tu­rer got mixed up in his own words far too often and ended up not cove­ring everything he had plan­ned to — mea­ning more work in my own time; an Elec­tro­nics one — where I revi­sed basic elec­tro­nic com­po­nents and sys­tem wor­kings (i.e. resis­tors in para­llel) and a fluids and energy one — where the pro­fes­sor jum­ped straight into some nitty gritty boring stuff without explai­ning some of the fun­da­men­tal con­cepts… it was also highly boring and boring and boring and boring.

Now I have more Maths to do — pri­ma­rily com­ple­ting the square and work with hyper­bo­las, ellip­ses and circ­les — two con­cepts I never fully got my head around during school days. Won­der­ful. I also wish to unders­tand what the fluids man was tal­king about, so I must write out notes for that — boring “what is a sys­tem”, “what is work”, “work is gay” things. This is hard because the han­dout pro­vi­ded is pretty much typed all in capi­tals with poor use of for­mat­ting, bold and under­li­ned text (- or lack of) and no real struc­ture. At least the text is rele­vant, the elec­tro­nics pro­fes­sor, who has con­cise to the point lec­tu­res, has made us buy his £40 text book — a book that likes to WAFFLE — i.e. it will tell us, after rea­ding the intro­duc­tion, on the second page, what it said in the intro­duc­tion and how that will apply to something he is dela­ying telling us in a huge para­graph that takes me fore­ver to read. Little struc­ture here too, key words are in bold but key con­cepts and sen­ten­ces are not in out­li­ned boxes or anything and ove­rall it all looks like one large box of text — making fin­ding things anno­ying. No struc­ture and waf­fles = annoyance.

Ques­tions I am yet to do are mainly Eng Mech ones which are of the wishy-washy type that asks you to use rele­vant sour­ces to esti­mate (NOT GUESS) the weight of a typi­cal car and the mass of an ave­rage domes­tic cat. The ques­tions are pro­vi­ded to make you think in the correct man­ner or something. But I have spent school kno­wing that an esti­mate is not a guess. I have long known methods of going about making an esti­mate, so it seems point­less to me, spen­ding my time researching a really mun­dane ques­tion that I could just guess at — where gues­sing would be much more con­ve­nient and help­ful to me. This seems iro­nic (word of the week).

Well, the lec­ture calls and I must also spend another £70 on books! Because books are nee­ded and EXPENSIVE. Ther­mody­na­mics books, Eng Mech books and something about Meriam and Maths. All £30 each or more.

Fun comes from card games with corri­dor friends. Devi­sa­tion of new games and words.