A New York City illustrator
transitioning to design & code.
It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.
—Grace Hopper, as quoted in the U.S. Navy's Chips Ahoy magazine (July 1986)
All in Education
How learning how to write, draw, and be human is teaching me how to learn code.
Today when we broke into pods I determined my goal for the next week (which would matter because I was 97% sure I'd just flamed out on our first bi-weekly assessment) would be to write a code snippet of my own for each new lesson using the concept we'd learned in that lesson—similar to what I did here. I was surprised when after telling the teacher my plan he advised me against it, instead recommending I go back and review old exercises and look at previous bits of code that I knew worked. My brain resisted this probably well-tested advice at first. I wanted to make new stuff, not review things!
This post is about taking better notes and is inspired by Ana. Hat tip to her for these methods. [...] Ana also saves homework quizzes, midday check-ins, and full lessons as PDFs and then opens them in Adobe Reader to add comments/take notes on the pages using Reader's stickies function. I had to download Google Chrome to save web pages as PDF; Firefox and Opera required adding plug-ins.
But the reason that I said it was important for me to sit with the feeling of failure was because it was just a feeling. And feelings pass, and are NOT facts.
I may have gotten lower on the assessment than I would've liked, but that doesn't mean I didn't gain valuable insight and experience from it. And just because I felt I failed, that does not make me a failure. That's an important distinction for me to focus on, because failures give up, but people who fail can persevere, grow, and learn.
Little moments like that make office hours immensely valuable.
