To make a long story short, it has been two weeks ever since I last borrowed a book from our school’s library and renewed some others so as I may still bring them home as references for my two reports. But I have been scouring the library for resources as early as late October since I have anticipated that things would be rough and tough for me as days tag along, given the fact that I am not growing any younger hence my brain cells losing acumen. To admit: I am not as sharp as I have been in my youth—as I have mentioned in my previous post, 9 more years and I will be forty—so reading materials for that much sought-after data and referencing can be a pain in the neck. To complicate matters, I have been diagnosed with a kind of epileptic condition, one of the repercussions of which would be a degradation of my existing neurons, letting them “die” through a series of seizures hence accelerating the onset of dementia or Alzheimer’s. Of course, I would do everything in my power to deny that it should be so, but in actuality I now feel the onslaught of such symptoms: there would be glitches in my comprehension skills that I could not focus properly. It does not help that I also experience panic attacks and anxieties, with random breakdowns that render me utterly helpless. All these have I kept in mind, the reason for preparing really earlier for two written reports (with another one coming), all for my mental health’s sake. I do not want to plummet yet again into a Gehenna of hyperventilating spiels or worse unbearable breakdowns that leave me desolate for days on end. All I want is to be prepared, well-versed on my reports, and confident that I know I can deliver.
Fast forward to today, with my report on Friday: I haven’t even gone past two paragraphs with a less-than-stellar manner of concluding each paragraph with circular reasoning about Systemic Functional Grammar and its role in pedagogy. My head has been constantly spinning round and round along gutters and sewage systems of thought processes perpetually eschewed by my cognition of things since they deal with loads of technicalities that I feel not so adept about. Then there are the diversities of terminologies which, to my chagrin, all sound worse than Greek to me (Newspeak would be the better appellation to it). All these somehow keeping my brain move forward through all its four wheels, setting it up on traffic jam mode that would rival even the busiest hours of commuter hell in La Manille. I could not seem to move past beyond the construct of SFG working along the framework of meaning, with functionality as its crux so people could get themselves to interact well across the social sphere. And yes, I get it that SFG deals with metafunction, whereby grammar takes into consideration harmony of meanings that would take care of the ideational, interpersonal, and textual roles of language within a semioticised system. Very well indeed! But lo and behold, apart from those basic percepts, everything seems to escape my mind’s route. The fundamentals as to how could SFG really be used in teaching leaves me in the dark on how exactly a learner in the classroom may benefit from all those grammar blues by introducing something functional that shall ne’er make any student’s nose bleed. Of course, I recognise that there is this pertinent connection. I know it’s all about the dawn of the communicative approach in teaching. I know that SFG spawned that change from an uber-traditional perspective of classroom instruction to a less inhibited and restrictive means of acquiring (and eventually, using) language on a very extensive platform. Yes, all those! Not too Greek to y’all, right? It’s clear that there’s this likely connection between theory and execution, abstract and concrete, the laboratory and the real world.
But why the heck can’t I express it? Why can’t I write it down?
The problem is, I just cannot delve into explaining my thoughts away about the communicative approach in the classroom without “mastering” (somewhat, even in the meanest way possible) ins and outs of SFG, of which doing so would entail that I read the ENTIRETY of what all those books by Halliday (the proponent of SFG), Eggins, and Fontaine have to say. There seems to be a sordid and unsettling feeling that berates me of my “incapability” to read Halliday’s mind and explicating on his principles once and for all in terms of how the classroom can enjoy the fruits of systemic functional grammar not merely as a grammar teaching framework but one that also deals with how students ought to express themselves in their use of language. How should I know? I just feel too aged at 31 years old, with chronic forgetfulness leering at me through my mind’s eye. To make matters worse, I had recurring episodes of cough and cold that developed into a flu. This I had to endure for two weeks: those two weeks where I should have been poring over my books and taking down notes to make my life easier. But no. I could not because I was mostly sleep-deprived all because of that darn dry cough zapping me of my most-prized stamina needed to outlast longer nights of reading and comprehending SFG across the diversities of metafunction. Without sleep spells doom to my weird bunch of synapses that wouldn’t so stubbornly connect themselves so as to send messages through my mind’s network.
So two weeks of doing nothing because I could not understand a thing I had been reading… no thanks to flu keeping me wide awake till 4 or 5 AM EVERYDAY.
No other recourse therefore but to cram (and this is what I have been doing since Friday since I felt a bit fine that day). You could imagine how my emotions have been in a fix even prior to Friday, well because writing a paper—an academic paper most especially—isn’t for the faint of heart. One needs a double amount of time, space, and servings of coffee to do the trick. For my part, efforts need to be leveled up than most people since I have a neurological condition which poses a direct hindrance to my cognitive skills, not to mention that fatigue can join in the nemesis bandwagon as well. I could very well experience a burnout and eventually a psychological meltdown if things go beyond my control (believe me, you don’t want me going through that for things can get really pretty nasty). But it seems that, no matter how I put things in the proper perspective or prepare according to a foreseen schedule, nothing seems to work out. And these debacles I narrate to you dear readers right now serve as a testament to how much frustration and disappointment has come my way, just because of a paper and all the ensuing stumbling blocks that laid waste all my efforts to finish my work on time.
Indeed, there’s nothing worse than messing up with a writing-an-academic-paper routine as one’s feelings can literally reach boiling point and explode through inopportune moments… more so if it deals with malicious “go-betweens”.
Now as I end this highly-spirited rant (hopefully, “done in good taste”), all I concurrently desire is for me to finish this thing and move on to the next. I can never ask for anything more inasmuch as each dawning day seems to castigate me into a worthless existential conundrum.
(And I should admit, I am getting more depressed and irksome every time I wake up these days. Oh no, not a good sign as it’s becoming apparent now that my emotional scale is tipping over.)
Deus, miserere nobis.