Ever since classes went fully online in the spring semester, I've had a horrible time concentrating during lectures. There's the usual self-caused distractions—the phone, the browser, literally any other room of the house besides the one with the lecture playing—but even when I'm there, trying to focus like a Good Boy, it's really hard to lock in and take something from the class. Since the classes are three hours long, only twice a week, it's a real grind trying to force focus. Don't look to me for advice on how to do it.

Except today—I tried something accidentally. In the finance class we were doing some calculations on bond values, and I went to Excel like I normally would for calculations. And we occasionally needed to shift the term length on the bonds, and calculate the annual value like we would on a timeline, and Excel was just feeling a little too stiff—changing the number of rows or columns or whatever on the fly, manually. And I was focusing that great anyway, so I popped open Eclipse and started trying to create the calculations in Python instead.

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I never really got the thing to do much yet (finance_sandbox.py) but there was a different kind of focus that set it once I started doing it. Setting up classes and thinking about what attributes of the bonds I had to capture from the lecture, trying to quickly think of abstractions so that I could calculate problems with different features from the lecture—having to create and re-create the most basic aspects of the things we were learning about turned out to be very helpful.