Frustration

I am sitting at my table surrounded by books about HTML, blogging, web sites, etc. I have a pile of CD's sitting there waiting to be downloaded into iTunes to try yet again to make a podcast with music. I have Camtasia and Expression Web sitting on my hard drive waiting to be made into a movie. And I find myself experiencing an overwhelming sense of being sucked into a pit of quicksand.

I'm not used to "not getting it" in classes. Usually classwork comes fairly easily and in most of my classes so far, the 'product' has been a paper or a Power Point presentation, both of which I can whip out fairly quickly.

This class reminds me of my first chemistry class in high school. I kept struggling with trying to understand the concepts and feeling totally lost. My teacher told me one day that I needed to give up on trying to understand chemistry at this level - I just needed to memorize the formulas, do the work and at some point, if I kept taking chemistry classes, there would come a moment when it would start to make sense. Unfortunately, there aren't really formulas to memorize in this class and to make the computer do what I want it to do, I do need a certain understanding of what I need to do to make it do whatever I'm working on. I don't have years to take classes until I finally understand, I need to make a movie by next week and a website by the end of class and I'm about 4 podcasts behind.

I came to the conclusion today that I need a tutor. Someone who I can pay to show me - hands on- how to do all of these tasks and who can show me over and over until it starts to make sense. Tomorrow (Monday) I will start my quest for this person. I have no idea if PSU has a place where students look for jobs but if so, I will start there. My son suggested a website called meetup.com where people with common interests can hook up on line and if they feel comfortable doing so, they meet in the real world. So wish me luck in my quest. I may pass this class, I may not but I want to try everything I can before giving up.