I seem to have spent the last week working solidly, but with peaks and troughs of success.
I spent a couple of days reading and paraphrasing my essay. I've got to about the half way stage with my word count, and was quite pleased with the way paragraphs are coming together. I'm starting to get a flow running through the essay, rather than isolated paragraphs.
At the weekend I spent quite a lot of time putting together my presentation for my Degree Planning module, ready for Monday. However I felt the presentation itself was a damp squib. I have not done a lot of drawing preparation for the module, but I have done a lot of thinking, which was the basis of my delivery. I had 3 previous sketchbooks which I was going to use to illustrate how I prepare and research, and how I use colour to convey emotion. I have discovered that I operate on a high level of emotion, and I have intuitively used colour for years to convey this. It is only in the last few months that I have realised this. But I think the tutor missed the point that I was using the sketchbooks to illustrate points, rather than using them as work I have done this semester. I spoke about using pomegranates because they were part of my zeitgeist from my Study Abroad year, and I want to use their colours to represent peace, joy and contentment (my current emotions). Red, orange and yellow are not normally associated with these emotions but I think by combining them with other colours, I can achieve the right emotional feel. The tutor dismissed my comments with " you need to use colour intuitively, not bother with emotional feel" and appeared quite disinterested. I think she completely missed my point. This is my work, and the emotional feel matters to me.
Because other students were quite interested in my drawn sketchbooks, I think I did not show my current working sketchbook which is full of my research and thought processes for the Pomegranate project. So the tutor did not see just how much work I have done. I suspect I have been marked down for this.
I find it really odd that at these presentations, the tutor does not give feedback on what goes well/badly. I specifically asked for feedback, and the other students made some contributions, but the tutor said very little. It makes me feel very uncomfortable to think that I am being marked down when I have asked for feedback and not received it. I feel I have been judged and assessed but I won't be told the outcome until it is too late. I remember speaking to other students who graduated last year, who had this tutor. A couple were disappointed and upset when they only achieved a very basic pass, when they felt their tutorials had been going well. They felt they had been let down as they had not been given any indication that their work was inadequate and they did not expect to get such a low grade. When I have been an assessor, we were taught that in continual assessment, people should know their anticipated grade because of the feedback they had received along the way. A low grade should never come as a shock. And when I was in Australia last year, the critique of work could be absolutely savage - I can't say I liked it, but at least I did know what went well/badly with my work and how other students viewed/interpreted my work. Back in the UK, we seem to be losing the quality of critique/feedback on practical work.
On the following day, Tuesday, I started proofreading the most recent parts of my essay. I began to get vision disturbance, and blossomed into a migraine for the first time in 20 years! That knocked out any work on Tuesday! I think reading books and computer screens, combined with being upset about my disastrous presentation caused it.
On Wednesday, I went to the Essay Plenary session. My Essay Tutor, Sara, gave me back the first draft of my essay, with some really positive feedback remarks. This bucked me up no end. She had given advice to cut a couple of paragraphs which were going off at a tangent to my main argument - and during the week, I had already done this. I was pleased that I was already editing in line with tutorial advice. Strangely, my headache finally lifted at this stage! And it took me years to work out that I operate on a high level of emotion!
Yesterday, I had another extensive session on my essay, and I now have about 4,500 words. I am still waiting for the case study research to reach me, which I plan to write about for 800 words. so I think I am now close to the word limit of 6,000 words. Time to start pruning and editing.
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