Education Report

Education Report 2015-10-24 (Saturday)

AI: PASS (only barely, but I did poke at this a bit)

French: WIN! (end of session one!)

Toastmasters: WIN! (could have done better, but good learning experience)

Writing: PASS (toastmasters)

Game: PASS (meeting with team)

A bit of improvement this week, which is a good sign given that this was election week and I had a medical test that disrupted a couple of mornings. Still much to improve, though.

Next week I'll definitely need to work on the AI course. I did take a quick look, though, and refreshed myself on where I was at. I also remembered that I was enjoying the course, which is key to getting back into it.

I'll have to be a bit careful with French. We have finished session one and will have a short break before session two. I may try to write a short essay in French this week just to keep in-practice, or maybe I'll go through my notes and review some of the new vocabulary. But I attended every session and did every homework assignment, which might be a first for me in any course ever. So I'm calling that a win.

In Toastmasters I didn't prepare enough for the meeting, so I'm calling my win based on the idea that: 1) everyone really enjoyed my introduction to the meeting, 2) I've learned a lot about what to do better next time. I'm going to sign up for the toastmaster role again in a few weeks so I can apply what I learned. Mistakes are valuable if you learn from them, and punishing if you just sit around feeling guilty about them. But I'm optimistic that I can turn this into learning. And people really did enjoy my introduction. So I'm calling that my writing credit for the week too.

We had a good discussion with the game team. The next step is mostly in other peoples' hands, though I'll make sure I do something useful this coming week. That might be a review of productivity tools like Trello to see if there's a good system we can use for tracking our documents and conversations. Email is good for some forms of communication but not ideal for others.

Because this is the first week where I'm taking a pass in all categories (even if it's a pretty slim margin on the AI course), the image I'm posting this week is a victory image. The photo is from a ride called Slotzilla in the Vegas downtown: you get to zipline above the crowds. It's a bit awkward (I spent a chunk of it going backwards), but a good rush. This week was exactly that: a bit awkward, but a good rush of some modest success.