Personal Awareness and Responsibility: How I manage school-related stress
Artifact
Great example of me getting stuck on a problem and making mistakes. I just kept trying new approaches, even when it seemed repetitive, and eventually got to a result. This was dv/dt = av^2+bv+c, but I had to solve for s(t), which led to lots of weird things happening. OneNote doesn’t let me show nearly everything at once.
Self Assessment
When I get stuck on a problem, I have strategies for what to do next. They include:
Checking for mistakes – This is even important when I can’t find an approach that works, because mistakes can sometimes hide a simplification step, for example. I can do this step-by-step and even redo the problem without looking at my original work to see if there’s anything I missed.
Working on easier versions of the problem – These are easier to think about and may have a similar solution to the problem I have to deal with.
Trying different approaches, again without looking at my previous work – I sometimes subconsciously assume my first approach is the only approach, so I need to ensure I can find new approaches without being biased towards my original one.
I can prevent some school-related stress by ensuring that I have a good understanding of the course material and that I don’t try to move forward before this happens. I can also see how quickly I’m finishing an assignment by working on it for a while, and use that to judge how much time I need to set aside.
When I make mistakes, I don’t beat myself up. Instead I make note of them (sometimes by literally typing them out somewhere, or writing them down) and ensuring that they will happen less frequently (or preferably not at all) in the future.
For example, I once forgot to answer a pretty significant portion of a question or two on a test, so I made note of it. Although I think that a somewhat similar incident happened again, I would like to think that this reduced the number of times this happened.
When I am feeling anxious about a test, I can calm myself by:
Trying practice questions and studying – The more obvious solutions; I’ll feel less anxious about a test if I’m better prepared.
Properly thinking about what will happen, which is often not nearly as bad as what people subconsciously assume can happen.
Going through the material in my head when I’m doing other things – While I can’t spend all of the 24 hours before a test preparing with practice problems and studying, I can get some preparation for the test from this. This ensures I have a solid understanding as I have to fully understand concepts without writing anything down or doing any “real” math work to try to figure out a concept again.
