I feel safe saying that every class I've sat in this week has held a caution: avoid the pitfalls of incorrect assumptions; furthermore, get educated--right now!--about every incorrect assumption you could make. But how many cautions can my head really hold?
This semester my head is being filled with concepts that I may not yet fully appreciate or understand. Dave fills Intro to Development with cautions about how to perceive development, poverty, people, solutions and statistics. Field Study Prep fills my head with warnings about methods that are challenging or impractical, ethical and cultural situations I'm going to struggle with, and program items I should be focusing on. Middle East and Africa are just geography classes that delve into population, environment, and political nuances I should have known about last week or last semester. Twi is over my head and difficult to find time for with the mass of other classes I'm taking; worse still, I just record the Sister Black's lectures in religion, and otherwise it isn't even an afterthought... SID? Cultural Inquiry? Roommates? Callings? A boyfriend with a crazy schedule too??? (I promise I'm not having any sort of rant or mental breakdown, I'm just trying to express the semester's overarching emotion).
I assume that anyone reading this blog understands what I'm trying to express; there's a sense of being overwhelmed and overloaded that comes with the college experience. The constant stress and assignments are teaching me that there's a lot I don't know--which I think is mostly very good for me. If we had all the time in the world, we wouldn't have the chance to decide what was really important from moment to moment. These feelings can be motivating and absolutely, meeting expectations is sometimes necessary and always rewarding. But how come our professors expect us to absorp everything they've said, regurgitate it for the test, and remember it beyond their class for the rest of our lives? To cite ideals from C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity, we are imperfect people and sometimes we hold others to a higher standard than we ourselves could ever attain. I wonder if my Professors sometimes do that too, or maybe they all just overestimate how much I already know...
I think the purpose of this blog was just to express conflicts I'm experiencing this week. These are conflicts I think I'll experience every day in the field. How should I deal with the challenges of sensory and brain overload? How can I prioritize what I need to do each day? What mistakes will I make in the field as I struggle to juggle new things, new people, new experiences with the expectations of ISP, IRB, my professors, and the plan I make this semester?
I think that making my plan for the field simple will help. I think that focusing on conversation opportunities will be my highest priority. A close second that I'll have to have is maximizing those encounters by recording and reviewing the implications of those experiences. Maybe this week I should work on recording and reviewing experiences.
I remember learning on my mission that people aren't computers that can just download as much information as you give them. They are souls that learn in different ways and often their application isn't what you expect. People learn by personal expereinces of trial and error, they learn things deeply when they first had deep questions or when a person asks a question they can't answer. Time is a constraint that makes us realize and choose the most important things. Mistakes are made everyday and they don't mean we should lose sight of the big goals we have...
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