There’s a lot of work, a lot of reading and some writing. While I’m enjoying going to lectures and tutes and I’m enjoying being told to read heaps, and I’m also enjoying the writing there are things I’m not enjoying. Most specifically the fact that I don’t think I’m good enough to do the work and therefore I’m not doing it well enough.

My aim this trimester is to get a credit in each unit. With a credit being somewhere between 60 and 69% I feel I’m pushing really hard just to get this mark. I’ll be satisfied with a pass and not satisfied with anything below that as it means I’ll have to repeat the unit at some stage.

Saturday I glanced at the calendar and realised how the dates have gone by so fast and that I had an assignment due in Sunday night. This modern way of submitting assignments is awesome as it meant I could work right up almost until the deadline giving myself just a couple of minutes to upload the work, I submitted it with three minutes to spare. I’m not entirely happy with it.

This is the piece where I suddenly realised I didn’t understand the referencing at all well. It’s something both tutors have covered in depth and something I’ve answered questions on in my first assignment but with my colander-like brain I’d forgotten absolutely everything I needed to do and googling for the details on the Deakin website only helped a little. My own fault, if I’d been keeping my dates in mind I would have been at this point two or three days ago and I would have had more time to do the research and remind myself exactly what to do.

This particular assignment was to write two creative pieces using two characters from the book The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and then produce a critical essay detailing what I’d done and the challenges inherent in it. I think I’ve done a reasonable job and I think I’ve managed to justify what I did but I had so few words for the critical essay I found it rather a challenge. Each piece had to be very close to 500 words and I was within the ballpark for each of them, one was rather too close to the lowest range of 10% for my liking but it’s finished. On the other hand, I had to include the essay question and that might have taken me up to the right number, but if it were me marking it I’d be leaving that out of the equation.