Week 8 Growth Mindset

If this post feels a bit gloomy to you, it may be because I just got a pretty bad grade in one of my classes.  I'm working on bringing it up and talking to the TA and teacher more, but it is still rather disheartening.  I'd hoped that this semester would be slightly easier than my last one, but I am feeling even more stressed and frustrated than last year.  I may have overreached myself, but I don't want to back down from any of my commitments either.  So, even before this post, I've been worrying a lot about where I'm at in terms of time management and classes and how I can handle everything I signed up for.

Thinking through all of the continuums, I am worried that I am faltering in a few of them, especially the ones about time management and attitude.  I want to choose what's hard and challenge myself and try new things and work on improving myself, but it's just so difficult.  That's pretty much a horrible and defeatist thing to say, but I'm so tired and exhausted all the time that I don't really want to.  More and more I just want to slide into the easier path and put off my homework and do fun and relaxing things.  I know that's going to make things worse on myself in the future, but I just want to do something that will make me less stressed out.

I'm not going to give up though.  Things will get better, and starting this week I'm trying to implement more effective time management strategies and get things done earlier.  I'm trying to segregate myself from my friends when doing intensive homework and making sure to get enough sleep so I don't fall asleep in class.  This class is definitely helping me with time management strategies because I can always plan for this class so I'm trying to implement plans for all of my other classes too.  I hope by the end of the semester I can look back and be proud of myself for accomplishing everything and improving myself.

I'm trying at least.  Web Source.

Growth Mindset

I have never heard of Carol Dweck's growth mindset philosophy before, but I have heard of variations of it, most recently in Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers.  I find these points of view very interesting because I have always viewed myself as someone firmly on the growth mindset but I am not sure where I got that tendency from.  Throughout my school career, I was always told how smart and intelligent I was, but that never stopped me from wanting to learn or pushed me to shy away from challenges.  In fact, I enjoyed challenges the most because the rest of the time school was very easy.  Carol Dweck's points about parents' praise interested me as well because my family has also constantly praised me for my intelligence rather than my efforts or processes, so I am not sure why I have not had more of a fixed mindset.  I do have that attitude towards other things I am not good at, however, like art and sports, but I am trying to put more effort into those and eventually succeed.
This last semester did test my philosophy, however, as I did not do as well in most of my classes.  I took a programming class for fun and because I had been very interested in and done well in the earlier intro class, but this class was much more difficult.  Ultimately, I am not proud of how much I wanted to quit simply because it was harder than things I was used to, but I stuck it through for the entire semester and learned a lot about coding at the end.  I am glad for the experience, but it's not something I want to repeat again, and I'm not sure if that speaks to a bad part of my character or not.
This semester should be better for me though, and as I have just switched majors I am very excited for my new major classes.  I hope I will enjoy this major much more than my last one.  Anyway, things have changed now and will continue to change and I hope I will be able to handle them.

 Image Information:  Winds of change.  Web Source.