Revision going pretty well, wow, don’t think I’ve ever said that in my life before.

I’m getting more into a routine with it which helps, of course, but also I’m finding the work more successful than expected. The History of Philosophy from Descartes to Kant paper I am doing was my biggest worry w.r.t. philosophy, because it was something that I did well over a year ago and it was a time when I wasn’t putting anywhere near as much time into philosophy as I should have been. So I’ve been putting a lot of time into that, and it seems to be paying off: today I successfully put together a pretty decent exam-style essay on one of the topics with a Clever Point; that’s what it’s all about, for each paper I basically need five or six Clever Points (amounting to twenty in all) that I can write out in the exam.

This point was pretty incomprehensible in the text it comes from, typical Bernard Williams prose, and it was my tute notes that saved me: tute notes my tutor at the time was always trying to stop me from making. Well, this time they made things perfectly clear. ‘The worry is that the semantic content of the willing is talking about the fingers yet the thought is only capable of moving the brain; on Descartes’ story the semantic content of the thought is doing the causing, but psychokinesis seems only able to affect a part of the brain, which isn’t something we can will the movement of.’ YEAH!

This gives me hope for my two maths papers which are total enigmas right now. I opened up my Galois Theory notes the other day and very little was recognisable; ‘counting homomorphisms from simple extensions’ was pretty much the only thing I recognised but there’s no way I can prove the theorem atm. And this is a course I did quite a lot of work on over the vacation at Christmas and New Year, so only a few months ago. Topology & Groups, my hardest course, is even more baffling. Part of this is that I just spent a term not doing maths, and having an amazing time, and I strongly suspect that my subconscious convinced itself I was never doing maths again.

The only problem is just how long this is taking. I’ve been revising for almost three weeks now and have made it through two or three of those twenty philosophy topics. For maths my goal before term begins is to have my notes ready for each course so I can spend term doing past paper questions and filling in gaps in my notes and mind as I go. So far I am at something like 65–70% completion of my notes.

So, I guess I should have pushed myself to do more hours per day in the first few weeks of the vacation. However I’m now in a position to do loads, and to ramp it up even more once term begins, so it’s important not to try and judge where I am so much and rather to just keep pushing myself to stick with it.