10 Hours of Homework; or, 5 Hours of Learning

I suppose I should start by explaining what this blog even is.

I like to think of myself as a relatively productive person. Despite this, I recently noticed that, with amazing consistency, I spent my Sundays lazing around in my dorm room, doing absolutely nothing of substance. This blog is my little experiment into changing that.

Every Sunday of this semester, I am going to do one thing, and only one thing, for the entire day. Other than reasonable breaks for meals and hygiene, I will spend every free moment of my day (totaling about 10 hours on a typical Sunday) devoted to that one thing.

I’ll start the semester with activities that one might realistically do for an entire day, like doing homework or watching a TV show, and explore stranger and stranger possibilities as the semester continues. My goal is to document the effects that these activities have on my mental, and in some cases physical, state, providing for you content that is both humorous and interesting.

And hey, if you ever find yourself with a free day that you don’t know what to do with, maybe this blog will help you decide.

So, without further ado, these are the things I learned from doing physics and engineering homework for 10 hours straight:

• ϕ is the most fun Greek letter to write.
• Σ is the least fun.
• Radar tracking systems are simpler than I thought.
• The equations for traveling waves are definitely something I should have learned about before this semester.

And here’s what I didn’t learn:

• Literally anything after hour 5

I had exhausted all of the graded homework I actually had to do by a little after lunchtime, so I spent the rest of the day outlining chapters in my physics book. This is usually a productive exercise; beyond creating a study guide for future exams, outlining the textbook usually gives me a solid enough understanding of the material that I do not even have to pay attention in class.

But, on Monday, when a new online physics assignment was opened up and I tried to complete it, I couldn’t remember a thing from the chapter I had just finished outlining the previous day. That’s not to say that the exercise was useless, however. I still managed to be productive, and I reaped the benefits of the work I produced (as I could simply go back and reference my outline instead of paging through the textbook). I just didn’t really learn anything.

All in all, I really wouldn’t recommend doing homework for 10 hours straight. If you absolutely need to, sure, go for it, you’ll get stuff done. But spreading it out throughout the week, in my experience, is far more effective in actually learning the material.