Week 6 at UoPeople is almost complete!
It was Victoria Day weekend here in Canada, which made for a very busy weekend filled with distractions, and obligations, making it difficult to keep up with my school work. With some careful planing, prioritizing and sacrifice, I was able to find a way to balance school, work, and play this weekend… Let’s talk about it.
Although my time at UoPeople has had some challenges, so far no weekend has been as demanding as this past one. Victoria Day weekend in Canada means the Monday after is a holiday, and most Canadians plan to participate in family gatherings and festivities, which include having barbecues, fires, camping, drinking and fireworks. If that doesn’t sound busy enough, it was also my wife’s birthday Monday, and we had a birthday celebration for two of her friends who had birthdays this past weekend as well.
On top of all of this, my mom and brother, who live in Michigan came up to visit too! Even more still, two old friends of mine who used to be stepbrothers sometime ago, came into to town to visit – whew!
My Weekend Schedule
Friday – barbecue and fire with old friends, and also the day my mom and brother showed up, so the day was spent cleaning and prepping for the “event”, and the night was spent entertaining, cooking, catering and socializing for my guests. Including my 2 friends’ girlfriends we had 6 guests plus me, my wife, and our son.
Saturday – barbecue and fire / birthday celebration for my wife’s friends. This included an afternoon get together of about 8 people plus 2 kids, and a baby, followed by drinks and a fire in my backyard after the kids were in bed, until about 1:30am. (I stayed sober).
Sunday – Cleaning up an insane mess in my house/backyard and then preparing for an overnight stay at my wife’s aunt’s country property where they have a huge firework show every year with about 100 or so friends and family showing up. (This was the event I had to sacrifice).
Monday – Wife’s birthday. Had a get together with a few friends and family. We ordered pizza (’cause I was sick of cooking and cleaning up all weekend), and had cake, and then socialized for a few hours.
Sacrifice.
“Life is full of boundless possibilities, but in order to transform a possibility into a reality we have to choose — sacrificing the many in order to attain the one. Nothing is gained without something relinquished.” ~ Anonymous
I’m very determined to do well in school, so slacking off because of one hectic weekend was not an option for me. There are a few things I managed to pull off to help me stay on track with my assignments. First of all, I made sure to sign on to Moodle (The learning environment UoPeople uses) as soon as I was up Thursday morning, which is the first day assignments are posted. I went through my routine of preparing notes for my reading assignments and creating a task list of everything I had to do, and learning from last weeks experience, I double checked everything and made sure I was confident in all of my due dates.
As soon as my son was off to day care I started tackling my assignments. But this time instead of doing one after the other like I usually tend to do, I sort of did rough drafts for all of my assignments at once. I started by inadequately answering questions while skimming the reading material. By the end of Thursday I had almost everything at least in rough draft, or at the least some quickly jotted notes about what kinds of thoughts I had about the assignments. I had to sacrifice some time that would have been used to get some other work done, but it was much needed, and I made up for it in the end.
Friday was crazy and I really had no time to focus on school, so with the exception of spending an hour in the morning it was a right off, as I had anticipated.
As for Saturday, I also anticipated that it would be a right off, but because I stayed sober for the events, later at night I was able to bring my laptop to the picnic table and scratch a few list items off the checklist, that didn’t require too much concentration. This is were having your friends and family know and understand you obligations to school can really benefit, as I was able to focus a bit of my attention to homework, while still being partially social.
Sunday was my day that I chose to make a big sacrifice. There was just no way I was going to be able to commit to everything last weekend without falling behind in school, so I chose the one event that was not going to take place at our house. I helped my wife get ready during the day, while getting the house and yard work done. Then I had my mom look after my son for me after dropping my wife off at the big family bash (thanks mom!).
This allowed me to to sit and focus on my homework for a nice solid 10 hours with periodic breaks. It really sucked that I wasn’t able to go to the fireworks, and my wife’s family were all sad to hear that I wasn’t going to stay, but it was a much needed sacrifice. Because of it, I was able to get myself into a good position for this week. I’m very close to having all of my assignments completed, and it’s likely I’ll have the remaining submitted tonight!
That’s all for this week’s update,
Cheers!
Dan
