I get it! Finally. I knew it would come once I could go old school with quill and parchment. In class I am typing as fast as I can, trying to break old habits with semicolons, colons, commas, and all the bracket types. I am one who uses the semicolon when writing; however, I have to change my silly ways now. 

Must. Adjust. Without. Fuss.

My point is, in class I am typing like a beast, making typos, losing track of the closing brackets, using a comma when a semicolon is needed, etc. To catch up, I miss out on some of what is being taught. “Just make the feckin’ code work, dammit!” If I can’t see the result on my computer, I can’t understand what I am doing. I do not give myself time to pause and think. 

Let’s get down and funky with metacognition: I’m a visual learner. I’m also part cat, so I can’t really enjoy something until I play with it, bat it around, spit it out on my instructor’s desk and wait to be scratched behind the ears. Again, two things: visual, playing (sometimes called doing, but playing is more fun). 

After the code in class works, and I know that it’s worthy of bronzing, I like to rewrite it by hand slowly. I’m a sloppy writer, so if I am going to refer back to this, I must write slowly. I keep these in a book I call “days after”, which are neater notes days after the information was presented. See? “Days after”? How am I not in advertising?! (Where is my interrobang?)

I have a few pages of code like you see above. It’s easier for me to flip pages than swipe through screens. I keep the screens for looking up things, but I do love me some reference books that I can touch and feel. I can touch where this.state is on one page and find the matching component on another and see them both when I bunch the pages together. 

But it’s not just the code in class and the class lecture. I like to read about what I’ve learned after I’ve had a few days to settle. Unfortunately, this is so time consuming that I never get to tackle the adventure or epic modes of my homework. Meh. I’m okay with that. If it means that I know something better, I’ll take it. I have the rest of my life to return to previous assignments and do them up drag-queen fabulous. 

When something really bothers me, I have to do it again. Props and State. They were always so close in my head. I almost got them. I understood them when I heard people talking about them, but I lost track of the all the this.state.props.setState.mentalState. Honestly. Just call them kiddieThings and parentalControlIssues. That I understand. And—egads—let me color, circle, and draw arrows. 

I cannot stop the class and as them to wait as I arrange things the way I can see them, so I stay up late and find examples online, look back over my class notes and get more examples. The phollowing photos are in my DIMyself reference book where I can refer back by topic. It’s much easier than trying to remember what day I learned what topic. 

I walked through this tutorial with crayons and a cat on my lap:

Could I lead a lesson on it? No, get serious. But I could play around with React on my own without wearing a path to my instructors’ desks, and—even better—I might even be able to be helpful to someone else.