Giving Up . . . or not . . .

I feel at a cross roads right now and am not too sure what to do. I feel too tired to keep motivated and frankly would like to just give up and do the minimum. I want to do things, and take risks and be creative on the MA but I feel like I'm making it hard for myself and just being the same fool as always where I try to do what I think but in the end am no better off for it - an MA is an MA right?.

At the moment I feel like just giving up and taking the attitude that I have 4 units left to go which equal 4 lots of books to read, 4 essays about the books which will all lead to a piece of paper that says MA on it.

I haven't touched my interactive piece since I started to write up my evaluation and found that I still couldn't understand what the MA regards as the difference between explicit and implicit. I'm probably going to abandon it now since I cannot see how I can write and make in the time I have left. Once again I've found myself in the same boat - ie I will end up writing thousands of words in a short space of time then spend the last week or two chopping bits out to meet a word count. That process does not lend itself to evaluative, critical or analytical thought so I know I won't be happy with the result. Hence it then becomes even harder to get motivated for it.

Added to this is the wretched paperwork for the coming inspection the week after the hand in date. I have 9 x 34 lesson plans to rewrite, a 34 page scheme of work for each course I run, a 120 page student profile, 3 class profiles, 360 student progress reviews, self evaluations and ILPs plus 4 lever Arch files worth of paper for each course I run! - on top of teaching and assessment.

I just have to be doing something wrong. I just can't figure out what. I'm heading towards a stark choice: give up my job and concentrate on the MA in which case I can't pay my mortgage or give up my MA and be stuck in this crap job. But then I refuse to give up my MA (admittedly at this precise moment the reason being that I've paid for it).

I'm so angry that I haven't figured this out yet! I have only just started this assignment and Jon's post about 'Hopefully by now you'll have 1500 words already written . . ." took me completely by surprise! My immediate first horrified thought was "When was I supposed to have started that?".

I had it set or so I thought. I knew what I was doing. then as soon as I started to write up my notes on the theories I found myself wedging loads of needless crap in because I can't figure out if my 'informed' reader is what I think he/she is. I read Goffman today and again I'm trying to figure out how to write up my 8 pages of notes so that together with Kolb they don't get over 4000 words. I've already decided to leave out Freire, foucault, giddens, schon, lewin and dewey - which means that its not what I thought so my original interactive piece now has lots of useless visual elements in it!

I've been scouring the net for examples of explicit writing versus implicit meaning and not really getting anywhere. I mean in the Kolb stuff, do I have to explain each stage of the cycle and give examples for every aspect of the LSI or would an 'informed' reader pick up the link to my own experience?

IOW can I write:

"My recent job applications have highlighted the extreme tensions in myself between the processing continuum and the perception continuum."

or would I have to write:

"My recent job applications have highlighted the extreme tensions in myself between the processing continuum which Kolb defines as . . . and the perception continuum which kolb defines as . . . . For Kolb the tension between these two is . . . . and as a result . . . Both continuums have two extremes which are . . .."?

I had a similar experience on the first year of my BA. The result was that I went into myself, stopped reading, stopped attending lectures and just did what I 'felt'. Mind you, I came out of it with a First . . .

Anyway, I'm not doing anything else tonight as I'm too wound up. No college work, no reading, no writing, no coding, no graphics. I'm just going to try to sleep and see if I feel better about it tomorrow.