I'm back to school myself. In my case, I'm 45 and I am reinventing myself as a civil engineer. (Life hint: don't get the Journalism degree in college. It is fun to get and there are essentially no jobs in the field. Pick a major that will let you pay back the student loans.) When I went to college the first time, I was afraid of the math because my high school math teacher told me I'd never be able to learn calculus. Turns out Calculus is really not more complicated than algebra, it is just the next step. It took me 20 years to get rid of that belief that I couldn't do it.
But I get where you are coming from. I get it very well. I'm burned out. I have one more year to go and I keep trying to figure out how to just take a break for a year instead. Spend time in the shop, do stuff with the kids, that sort of thing. Only, I'm running out of time, due to Alaska politics. The new governor is working hard to defund the university system in the state and I may well see my program lose accreditation in a couple of years, so I need to graduate while ABET still thinks it is a good program.
Yesterday, I had 3 hours I could have spent in the workshop. But I was tired. I didn't do it. Today, I will be spending about 6 hours doing homework for one class. Maybe I'll be done in 5, but it won't be less than that. I look at projects I've made in the past, I see skill that I am not sure I could actually bring to another project today, even if I had the time. I mean, I know I have the skills, but I'm not sure I have the little "edge" that comes from having inspiration as well as skill.
I don't know where you are in school. I can't give you great advice because I don't have any myself. But I can at least let you know that you are not alone in this.
How about this: pick one bow design you know you can make work. A simple board bow with linen back, perhaps. I mean, there's not a lot of character in that sort of bow, but it is fairly bulletproof. Make one. Shoot it. This is your "I know I can do this" bow. (I have a particular knife pattern that is my "I know I can do this" knife - a basic wood carving knife that I can knock out in a couple of hours, tops. It serves to remind me that I can make a good knife, even if my recent efforts don't live up to that knowledge.) The next point you knap that you actually like, even if it is very simple, you keep for yourself.
These are not motivators. These are establishing a base line of "I can do this." They don't motivate you to reach further, they keep you from getting so demotivated that you say "I can't."
After that, you remind yourself that when math gets hard (part of the problem is that it is taught so badly - a lot of math teachers go into that field because they find math easy, so they never had to learn how to do something that is really hard to them and that means they don't know how to teach it to someone for whom geometric proofs are not simple and obvious and beautiful) that you can do stuff nobody else in your class can do. You may be getting a lower grade than you want, but you can do stuff the teacher can't even imagine doing. That's something that actually works for me, though I have no idea why it should.
Keep your eyes on the prize, Ryan. You can make it. I don't know what your prize is, but I keep looking to the horizon where I know I won't have to break my body to get firewood for the winter once I have the engineering job and can pay someone younger to do the labor. I look to the day when I live in Alaska because I choose to, not because I can't afford to move. (Up here, if I want to move to another state, I have to pass through a foreign country on the way. Job interviews outside mean getting on a plane every time they want to talk to me. It costs so much to heat a house in the winter that trying to save money to move is really hard to do.)
You can do this. Not easily. But you can.
-Patrick
