Day 65

Something learned:

For the first 9 or 10 years of my school career, I found school fairly easy, so I coasted through. I excelled at math and science, scraped by in my humanities, but generally things were fine. Things started to get bumpy after that. Subjects like chemistry and biology were difficult because I had a poor working memory and found it hard to recall facts. Eventually, I memorized what I needed to get through the exams and put it behind me.

When it came to college, I encountered truly difficult work for the first time. Just understanding the material was nowhere good enough -- homework was substantial and required a lot of thought and problem solving. I found it fun, but it was exhausting -- I fell asleep over many a problem set trying to untangle it.

I would have had a lot less difficulty had I learned to work hard before then. It's rather amazing to me that I could get all the way to university before needing to work hard. If I hadn't managed to adapt and figure it out, I might have easily failed out.

My parents demanded good grades, but not hard work -- and in my case that was a crucial difference. As such, I consider it important to expose my child to things that challenge her and need her to exert herself. I care more how hard she has worked than how well she does. I hope it works out.

Today I was thankful for:

1. Having the chance to pull out my camera equipment to practice.
2. Finding a decent solution to a thorny code problem at work
3. My singing teacher telling me that I'm making good progress
4. Kiddo being cooperative and practicing hard tonight (The Pleygo Lego works well to motivate her)
5. Getting enough of my todo list done that I can relax and do some singing

Looking forward to:

I love going to open houses (and surprisingly so does the kid). I look forward to house hunting .. maybe in a year or two.