Tag: over50

Going to College over 50 can be very scary.  When you have been out of school for so long it can be overwhelming.  You start thinking can I do this?  Am I prepared for this?  Do I remember what I learned in high school?  These are a lot of questions you begin to ask yourself. 

The first day of school is very tricky.  Especially if you are taking online courses.  You begin to think I don’t know what the hell I have gotten myself into.  You start to read the course outlines and you come across essays.  Then you are like, I don’t think I can do this after reading the way they want it done. It is fairly simple to write, but an essay is not what I had planned.  Then you go on through your other classes to find out what else they are going to expect from you.  You suddenly read.  Speech about your childhood and your name.  Oh wow!  Not expecting that one either. 

I have found studying what is on the course readings and lessons that you also need to refer to the internet for additional readings.  Not everything you look for is in the course online. Currently I am taking three courses:  Art Appreciation, History to 1865, and Communications. 

Art Appreciation, I thought, was going to be an easy subject.  Well, I was wrong.  In this class you have flash words and not many of them are on the test.  You have a lot of reading and pictures to refer to in the online readings.  One thing I have noticed with the portraits in the book is that you have to look up additional information about the portrait and the author online especially for test time.  

History to 1865 is another one of my classes that  I am really enjoying.  In this class the teacher is really a good teacher. She puts out videos of herself explaining how to do essays and I enjoy watching them and seeing the excitement she presents in her videos about history.  She has a love for the play, “Hamilton” in which there is a movie on the play and it is really long. She is a tough teacher and wants you to learn. 

Communications class is not at all what I expected.  I expected something towards tv communications and this is not based towards tv communications but psychology.  I am learning from this class, but I do not have an interest in it.  I thought it was going to be a fun class but it is not fun at all.  I am not sure what this class is really supposed to be about and I will be so glad when I am finished with it. 

My classes I have mentioned are fun and some are not so fun. We had our midterms the first week of October.  I was nervous and some of the answers were very difficult.  In art I had taken so many notes on the pictures.  In history I felt I had written a story for each topic, and communications was very difficult finding all the answers to the study guide.  Working with the study guide gave you a sense of direction but you had to do additional research on the pictures, words, and events that occurred because not everything is always in a book with the lessons of online learning. 

So going to school after 50 you have to look at the lesson plans and decide what is important and what is not so important and take what you can learn and study it. I have been told by some millennials that you read the important things and skip what is not so important unlike when I was younger and you read everything. Then you will know how these younger generations study and pass.  

My question to millennials is…How do you know what is important or not unless you read it all?