This post is supposed to be about what I learned or didn’t learn this week and how coding made me feel this week. Well, as it happens, the first part of these questions doesn’t really make sense in my situation. I don’t know what I learned or didn’t learn. Putting this in conversation with the second part of the question, coding this week made me feel stupid, inadequate, humiliated, I was trying to do the horizontal ball-bounce. David had already told me that all I would have to do is add a single line of code, and the comment in Scott’s code also said as much. Nevertheless, I couldn’t seem to figure out what that code was—or how even the code leading up to the new code was relevant. Scott, during the Monday evening coding session, helped me code the ball bounces. However, although he let me enter the code myself, he nevertheless pretty much held my hand and spoon fed it to me. It was clear that he was getting smaller and smaller methodologically, hoping that I would get it, and I felt like I was disappointing him by failing to understand. I also think that my persistent neediness may be becoming off putting to my classmates, and I’m making a conscious effort to be less annoying.

Ultimately, I was so flustered and confused that I couldn’t even remember how to multiply by one. My brain pretty much just turned off.

David was gracious enough to help me with refactoring my rocket on Sunday but, sadly, I feel like I didn’t retain a single thing he taught me.

I’m sorry if this post seems jumbled, but it’s really an accurate reflection of the process.

I have been spending an inordinate amount of time working on this class, at the expense of other obligations. I keep feeling like something is going to click and then everything will make sense, but that moment has yet to come. This actually surprises me, since that is the way these sorts of things have happened in the past. Especially with concrete, tangible things like math, etc. I’m going to attend the early coding session tomorrow. I’ve completely screwed up my github desktop, and I want to clean up that mess. I’m hoping that if I can get organized and settle into a pattern then maybe things’ll get easier. It seems that every time I try to fix something, I make the entire environment worse. I have, though, taken what I think are pretty clear notes, but I consistently screw things up in spite of myself.

Rereading this, a lot of it sounds like self-pity, and I hate that. I’m going to stop writing now because I think I’m starting to just embarrass myself. «««< HEAD:_posts/2016-02-03-How Coding Makes Me Feel =======

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