Mea Culpa! ... or is it perl's?

I have to apologize for not writing as frequently as I should this week. All my time has been spent working on my programming homework. This means that I didn't do any of my reading to prepare for my other classes, the bulk of what I discuss in this blog. So I haven't had anything for you all to read about in the realm of education, librarianship, and history for a while. I'm not trying to make excuses or place blame I just wanted you to be aware of the situation.

I really enjoy my programming class. It's just hard. For the last assignment I went through the problems one by one and each took me many hours because I'm just plugging in bits of code to see if what I hope will happen happens. Eventually I was able to finish all of them, but only about an hour before the deadline. This time I'm attempting to work on all three at the same time because I felt like I kept going back to the same places in my search for understanding (and successful coding) and I thought I might be better able to actually express where I'm having difficulty and ask for help. But I don't feel like this approach has sped up my work or better prepared me to ask for help.

Programming is a lot like sewing (my favorite hobby and retirement career). It goes little bit by little bit and in order to turn out right you have to go slow and experiment with various techniques in order to get an end product which will turn out as you expect and desire. The similarities make INFM 743 my favorite class this semester (don't tell Nelson I said that).

For right now I'm okay with the assignments taking along time because I can see what I'm learning. I took this class to learn and I recognize that learning can be very messy. In someways I feel like I'm back in my 10th grade intro to computers class (essentially keyboarding), I would come to class everyday sit in the back and just work away. According to the syllabus and final exam I should have earned a D in that class for the skill level I achieved. But I knew nothing going in and I was so proud of what I learned by the end of it, even though I still wasn't very good. Hopefully being a little older and wiser, I'll be less likely to end up in tears at the possibility of not getting an A in every class ;)