Unexpected

I had a chat with M this morning about my course. I mentioned how Abel motivated Haron's studies and from my previous post how praise and acknowledging good work were going to be important to me. From this we moved to talking about how he was going to monitor my work - I'll get my timetable next week and we'll then sit down together and work out 'study' and 'play' hours.

We also talked about grades - when I did my BSc, every piece of work you did could be classified as a fail, 3rd, 2:2, 2:1 or 1st. This time, apparently, ther is only 'pass' and 'distinction'. And I've been warned by previous students that 'pass' is pretty easy to get, but 'dstinction nearly impossible.

M said that he expected me to work steadily and have any pieces of work completed a suitable amount of time before the deadline (e.g. a week before for 'big' essays, projects, etc.) - and that he'd read them to comment on sentence structure, grammer, etc.

It felt like having cold water poured over me. He wants to what? No one ever reads my work - apart from the people who mark it, of course, but that's different because they read loads and are used to them being rubbish. I'm immediately convinced that everything I write is going to be awful, and patently not good enough.

I know it's not true - I got decent grades the first time around and could have done better if I'd done better and, for example, written essays earlier than the night before they were due. But this is going mean he's monitoring my work a lot more closely than I'd expected. Help.

We also talked about what happens between being given an assignment and handing it in - I get very anxious at the thought of too much structure/rigidity about how I'm supposed to study, fortunately M agreed with my suggestion that I be expected to do "something" towards an assignment every week, and have it done a week (for example) before it's due, as enough structure to give us something to work with but without stifling me.

Maybe this will work after all. If I can get over the thought of him reading what I write.