Woes of a beginning programming student

I'm currently using ML in a class that I'm taking online (my only one for a week; the database class is better suited to self-study for me, I've decided, and that is what I will do if I can.) It's supposed to be a survey of various languages that will help teach programmers to more reliably recognize the semantics and idioms of languages.

I'm not sure if it's working yet or not, but I can say this: Recursion makes my brain ache. So far it's a bit like looking in a dictionary and having every single word defined by itself. I haven't yet made the conceptual jump as to how it works, or why, and so I'm basically doing my best to write the programs in the way that the language supports (and the class teaches) and hope that I can make that jump later.

(Two more classes are coming up - I dropped the nutrition class, because I think that I will have my hands full for a while. The other two are reviews of material I've taken before, that I would like a refresher on. I hope that will make them more manageable.)

Progress, 1/15 to 1/21

Most of my online classes are starting; one of them's started already. I'm honestly not sure how many of them I'll be able to do. And I think that it's sucking time away from other goals. I'm going to go ahead and cut some of them back; it's the only way to be sure I can do the learning thing, which I feel is more important.

I do want to keep up with some of them on various days, though. I'll just cut the number of days down.

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