Hard days of studying

The new school year has been going on for a good few weeks now, and I started this year with absolute good positivism and motivation. However, 4 weeks in, I have lost it all. I even lost every bit of discipline and concentration I used to have, but I think I lost that when I got a laptop 3 years ago.

However, as last year I always started my essays too late, started reading texts too late and was always distracted, I decided that this year I would do it all different. I would start in time with the readings, write my essays on time so that I could actually proofread them and correct them etc. This did not happen, not even in my first week....

I don't know why, but somehow I can't manage to do it all on time. Sigh. It might substantially improve my grades if I'd start in time, and also would decrease my level of stress excessively.

But there's time to work on that.

What bugs me a lot more, is the fact that English is not my first language and I thus have a hard time reading some texts. Don't get me wrong, I am pretty good at English, but I don't understand everything as fast as others would, especially when reading texts.

An example is when reading texts and chapters for my International Relations and International Organization minor. The course I am following this semester is called Theories of International Relations. In itself I would be able to understand it, if everything were in Dutch. I would even understand it if it was in simpler English. But what I am reading is terminology from within the IR course and people. Furthermore, the writers use such long sentences. One sentence could be 6 lines, and in that one sentence 1000 things could be told and explained. But as I try to understand each word within the given context, it takes me so long to understand one part, then on to the next part, then when I have figured that out I can't remember what the first part was about again... And then I still have to read 45 pages....

An example of this is the following sentence:

“On the side of the absolutist powers, power-balancing during the 18th century did not rest on the idea that each political actor enjoyed a priori its own internationally recognized legitimacy and independence based on natural law, which was to be preserved by an alliance against any aggressor, nor was it the automatic, law-like and depersonalized function of anarchy, which mechanically stabilized a given and re-equilibrated an altered distribution of power and territory” (Teschke 26).

I mean.... WOW. Must be a very smart sentence, but it took me quite some time to understand it all.

So yeah that is what I struggle with a lot, and then my lack of concentration also comes in, as when I read the sentence for the first time, I give up, go to tumblr and twitter and all that, then 5 minutes later I start reading it again and might understand it, but again, I go do other things... so that is one sentence every 5 minutes. 

Sigh.

I hope you all have more luck studying :)

Love,

Irma

Quote: Teschke, Benno. "Theorizing the Westphalian System of States: International Relations from Absolutism to Capitalism." European Journal of International Relations 8: 1, 5-48. 2002.