I’ve been quiet recently because I unexpectedly started a Level 2 course that is the first formal education I’ve done since I was a student 9 years ago! While I’m appreciative of the opportunity (and funding), which will help me to do the work I’m passionate about, it’s been daunting.
I thought I’d be okay, I’ve done many online courses before, but not with strict deadlines like this one. I feel like I went back to how I felt as a first-year degree student – totally lost! As someone who has been on the other side as a teacher in formal education for a decade, I thought I’d be more confident with study skills, I was even a study skills coach for a while, but as soon as I was a student, that went out of the window. I saw all of the work and how tight the deadlines are and panicked. Luckily, I have a support network that reminded me that I have been advising students in this exact position for many years and I needed to take a step back and listen to my own advice.
First, I checked out what student support they had, and explained that I have a brain that doesn’t process information as quickly as other people and that the stress was having an impact on my mental health. We then worked together to extend my deadlines so I have more of a buffer if I’m having a particularly difficult week, and I said I’d let them know if I needed more support.
Then assigned days to particular sections of the unit I was working on, leaving myself plenty of time for the assignment at the end. Doing this helped me to calm my brain down and do the work. I’ve realised through doing the first unit that my work cycle is much more streamlined than it used to be. As an 18-year-old, I was surrounded by books, drowning in words and trying to fit all of the information I found into a limited word count, inevitably going over it by thousands of words and then having to pair it back to the correct amount. Now I’ve found that I write down my class notes in as visual a way as possible (as I used to), but then I weed out the extra information from resources before I answer an assignment question. This means that the process takes infinitely less time and I’m more concise from the beginning. Now I’ve submitted my first assignment, I have the anxiety of “what if it’s not academic enough?”, “what if it’s not the right standard?” etc. but I’m trying to remind myself that it doesn’t need to be perfect, just the best I can do at the time. In fact, John Lamerton’s books have taught me that I shouldn’t be going at 100% all of the time, I can’t – it’s not sustainable and I’m not a failure for taking it back a bit to a more sustainable percentage. This is a difficult lesson to remember at times, but it’s one I’m trying to keep in mind.
Serena Redferne Music 