Log 42 -- 24 April 2026
Apprehension, Eh?
Hey all, X here! In full truth, this week feels long in retrospect. I'm not sure if it's the exam I had yesterday, the lack of things to do outside of work, or some other factor I haven't put to mind. But I feel... really tired.
And a bit scared.
As the semester winds down, I'm growing concerns for the fact that I may be getting little to nothing out of the courses that I'm taking at this time. A lot of the content I'm going through feels like a mix of common sense and memorization, rather than learning. I know that I tend to let things pass by, but this feels like too much is passing by all at once.
Okay, maybe some of learning is a mix of common sense and memorization, but those two things aren't being held by something I think is just as if not more important: making it make sense. That is, I can see something, I can understand how it works, and it gives me a means of chewing on the information as I take it in. And being able to chew on information is so, so important now.
We have tools to make our lives easier. In math for example, we went from something as simple as an abacus to rulers, protractors and compasses, to calculators in all shapes and sizes built into our programs, and now other technological breakthroughs like large language models
But do you know how to use those things? You can use matrices to solve systems of linear equations, but could you pull up the Desmos Matrix Calculator and get it done? How many of the buttons on that calculator in your backpack do you never touch? Or outside of math -- you might know of a collection of roots and affixes, but can you form words from them, new to you, with a clear meaning?
And so, I again, find it significant that I know of the tools at my disposal, but can still forget that they exist. By now I had forgotten that xeriscaping was a method for keeping urban areas livable... somehow.
...And here I thought I was gonna share images this week. Yeesh. I think I've written enough to get a point across. Please, value your education. It's one of the few things they can't take from you.
Until next week, eh?