For my latest entry I was given the remit of finding a critical incident in my learning on the program so far, a point when it all seemed to make sense to me, ‘oh dear’ I thought.
Hard as I tried I just couldn’t pinpoint any one particular incident or time when everything just seemed to become clear, about the course that is. Although the same can also be said of my life.
However, over the Christmas holidays we were given only one piece of work to do, to read one of two books on HTML and CSS, not both books, only one. I had one already ‘HTML Dog’, so this was the obvious choice for me.
So Christmas came and went, and during a quiet moment I sat down and started reading the book. The introduction was hard enough, but once I got to the main content, well suffice to say it was all Geek to me (no that’s not a spelling mistake, it’s a computer coding book). I thought maybe I was tired or something, but upon trying several times again, nothing was going in. I got four chapters in, but couldn’t tell you what I’d read in the previous sentence, let alone the rest of the book.
Imagine my anxiety coming to our first lesson on coding websites, which started on Tuesday 12th January, and with a new instructor.
We started with a lecture on HTML, still none the wiser, but then we started to do some tutorials from the book and for some reason everything suddenly became clear. People around me were asking questions about the tasks and I was answering them; correctly. Steve, our usual tutor came into the room and asked me a string of questions and everyone was correct.
I simply understood what was going on. To the point that when we were asked to code some basic website designs in HTML I was nervous about what I was typing, because I thought it should have been more difficult than it actually was.
Apparently the HTML part of coding is quite easy, and CSS is more challenging, but just being able to understand the HTML gave me so much confidence. I felt quite elated. And now I’m looking forward to the CSS part of the program with relish.
Bring it on.
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