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3:25pm November 22, 2013

Coursera (and education in general)

So basically, my guess so far is…

In one of my classes, which was the one that was the most time-consuming, I got an A+.  Did really really well.  That’s pretty much guaranteed given my grades so far.

In my other class, I’ll be lucky to pass at all.

Because even though I got Bs and As on most things, as far as my actual score should have been from the answers I gave.  In reality I got Fs on at least half of the tests because he took huge amounts of your grade away for doing it late.  And I was so involved in the other class, and in recovering from surgery, that on at least half of the tests I was several days late at best.

I’m kind of disappointed.

I mean, I should be proud of myself, I learned a lot, etc.  But those late scores messed with my official grade such that I probably won’t technically have passed the class at all.  And that makes me kind of sad despite the effort I put into it.

I’ve already signed up for new courses, and I’ll be deciding which ones I’ll actually take, as they come up.  It’s clear that it would be difficult for me to handle taking more than two classes at once.

The classes I’m doing next are all sciencey things, from what I can tell.  And very difficult ones at that, that I’ll probably have even more trouble with than the two classes I just took.  Because even though these ones took a lot of practical effort, the actual concepts involved weren’t usually too hard.  It was the application of them that took all the time.

One of the classes I’ve signed up for next year is in a subject I’ve historically flunked.  So I’m quite nervous.  But I’m determined to at least try to learn it.  Maybe in the last 20 years my brain has gotten better.  Or… well, maybe not, probably not.  But I can hope.  The point of all this is to stretch my brain, so that’s what I’m trying to do.  And often the only interesting stuff was hard-looking stuff this time around.  And I can’t take a class I have zero interest in.

So we’ll see how it goes.

Either that or I’ll find another MOOC with more interesting classes and take those.  That’s possible too.  But I’d kind of like to see how I’ll do in the ones I signed up for.

I also wish there were MOOCs teaching high school level classes.  Because I never really went to high school.  Three months of regular high school and a couple years of special ed doesn’t count, and neither does “skipping” high school and going to college (in between those two things, or afterwards).  So when some of the prerequisites for these things are things like “high school biology”, where on earth do I learn high school biology?  I never took biology past junior high science classes.  I never took biology in college.  I have no way to get a beginning biology background, that I know of.  Frustrating.

(This, by the way, is why it’s really, really misleading to describe someone as “skipping” a grade and assuming they did it because they knew everything you teach in that grade.  That’s not what happens.  At all.  At least, not for everyone.  And repeating a grade doesn’t mean you’re repeating the same material, either.  I’ve both skipped and repeated grades, multiple times, and I never learned what I skipped and I never repeated material that I was supposedly repeating?  My educational history is weird weird weird.)

And yes, I know there’s other kinds of education than formal education.  In many ways, I handle non-formal education better, and learn better that way.  But right now I really need the structure of the formal systems involved, in order to get my brain to do these things.  Otherwise I’d just skip the difficult parts like I always do. And right now doing the difficult parts is important, because my brain needs the exercise, because oh hai brain damage, meaning oh hai cognitive rehab.

Anyway.  I got an amazing grade in one class and will be lucky to get a passing grade in the other.  I know grades aren’t everything either, but right now they’re one more thing that motivates me to do the work.