crafty aspirations

1 final exam, 2 presentations, and 4 massive papers? Check. The first semester of grad school is donezies. I put a lot of effort forth with most of the assignments...however, with one of them I decided to follow a motto I'd heard from a friend working on her Ph.D.:

The best dissertation is a finished dissertation.


So, laziness aside, everything's done - YAY! And that means I get to turn my attention to Christmas shopping and Christmas crafting. I made some adorable and delicious-smelling presents for my family, and I only had a few minor fails...such as:

Oh well. It's the thought that counts, right?

finals

In short, this is a particularly un-fun time of the semester. I've got 4 massive papers, 2 presentations, and 1 final exam. Thus far, I've completed 1 presentation, and written pretty solid drafts of 2 papers. But I've got a lot to do before December 15th at 5pm (when my last paper is due).

I'm currently working on a paper for a class that was cross-listed between English and Curriculum & Instruction. I seriously doubt that I will ever take another cross-listed course that isn't between two education-y fields. Even though I was an English major in undergrad, this course is focusing on a specific field within English -- which I have almost zero background in (and actually, had never even heard of during my undergrad days -- it's a new concentration at U of I). Thus, I'm having a pretty hard time figuring out how to do the research required for the literature review section of my paper. I like to work hard and figure things out, but it's quite tricky to learn the mechanics of a whole field in one semester -- much less to know the literature base so you can utilize it in a paper. Ugh. I think I'm becoming incoherent. Can we just fast-forward to December 15th at 5:01pm?

registering for classes

I asked Brian to help me narrow down my list of classes to register for. After we looked at a few and read some descriptions, he said something to the effect of, "So, are all the classes about how minorities? I mean, that's really valuable so you won't be a racist teacher, but they're not teaching you how to be a teacher!"

Although I really appreciate how liberal and progressive U of I is, I do wish that there were more practical courses. From my perspective, I'm pretty good at not being racist and recognizing the advantages I have as a white, middle-class, raised-Christian female. I want some strategies and discussions with other teachers about why this might work and the flaws in that. I suppose that's why I think I'd rather teach at a community college or PDS instead of a university.

and now, for something a bit lighter...

My writing studies teacher, on the gift of technology:

And what about the overhead projector? When that first came out, it was so amazing: this piece of technology that allowed you to face the class and simultaneously totally destroy your eyesight.

how we talk about racism

As I was reading an article this morning about social justice in curriculum evaluation, I considered how I usually discuss racism (often in the context of immigration). My argument is typically that we cannot stereotype people as a whole, and I often mention the model, hardworking immigrant.

That argument doesn't address what I believe actually causes prejudice: institutionalized racism. However, the argument about institutionalized racism is a lot harder for people to hear, because it requires whites to admit that we are oppressors. Another problem with the argument of institutionalized racism is that it makes the speaker seem more distant from their audience -- if you (and by 'you,' I mean a white person discussing racism) acknowledge that institutionalized racism is an overwhelming force in america, you probably place yourself within the (small) population of people working to resist it. That will create a divide between speaker and listener if the listener is not also down with the cause; and arguments tend to be more persuasive and more easily 'won' if the speaker can forge a connection with the listener and make it less threatening for the listener to alter their point of view.

Anywho, I don't have any answers to this quandary, just some observations. I'd like to move towards the more radical way of arguing, but I feel that doing so would just alienate my sparring partners -- I predict that they would listen to me less, placing me in a "radical crazies who talk about stuff I'll never agree with" category.

Edit: I think I'd like to do a research project on this at some point, exploring people's opinions of institutionalized racism (and their motivations for thinking the ways that they do) and perhaps trying to create a curriculum/unit that investigates institutionalized racism.

running

I'm starting to train again, starting tomorrow. I'm most likely training for another half marathon, but my running buddy wants to do a full marathon (you go, girl), so I think I will start training for that with her and see how it goes. The Illinois Marathon lets you change your race up until a certain point, so I have some flexibility.

I'm nervous, though. After the Kenosha half, I stopped running regularly. I sorta trained for Ragnar, but not really -- and I stopped running again after the relay (granted, I got injured...but I also lost interest.) I fear that training for, and completing, another big race will turn me off from running again. I guess I tend to take the post-race recovery period wayyy too far.

But for now, I definitely feel inspired. I had a great run with a great friend over the weekend, and we both ran much longer and farther than either of us had in a loooong time. I'm looking forward to training with my new running buddy and experiencing the roller coaster of emotions that comes with training and racing. Here we go!

And even though I feel so excited and inspired, I'm trying to remain grounded:

grammar and racism

Today, I observed a class for preservice teachers. I'm considering applying to teach this class next year, so I've hung out in there a few times, re-familiarizing myself with the material from a teacher's perspective. It's a course that I took while doing my undergrad, and I really enjoyed it (it helped that I had an awesome teacher who helped me understand the necessity of social justice in the classroom...thanks, P.Brady!)

In the class today, two students had to teach grammar in context (as opposed to grammar in isolation). They handed out copies of a text excerpt; the passage was a dialogue between two characters: one spoke in AAVE (African-American Vernacular English) and the other was a white character who spoke with a Southern accent (the text was written somewhat phonetically). The students explained that there were a lot of "mistakes" in this text and that our task was to "correct" them.

I was horrified. First, there's the slightly-weird fact that we were being asked to correct a published author's (Charlotte Perkins Gilman's) stylistic choice. I guess I can let that slide -- as long as there was a discussion of style that went along with the lesson. Second, and more importantly, we were being tasked with "correcting" AAVE. I almost could have been ok with this lesson if we were asked to "translate" the AAVE to "Standard English" (a term I'm not entirely comfortable, but will use for the sake of this post). Perhaps we could have discussed the style and talked about what was lost and gained by reading the text in AAVE vs. SE.

But none of these discussions occurred. We were supposed to view the AAVE as wrong English and fix it.

I asked the instructor, while the students were working on their "corrections" how she was going to address this situation. She said that they work a lot on issues of sensitivity and diversity in the spring semester, so she would deal with it then. Also, this was the students' first experiences teaching, and it was supposed to be a safe space to screw up and not get slammed for it, so she didn't want to make them feel awful. Both of these reasons are totally valid, and strategically, I support her. But damn, it was REALLY hard to keep my mouth shut during this lesson.

If someone actually did this lesson in a classroom, especially a classroom with students who grew up speaking AAVE, it could have traumatizing impacts on the kids. They would think that AAVE is just bad English. There was no discussion of the grammar system of AAVE, the legitimacy of it as a dialect, or it's ties to culture. Can you imagine how damaging that could be to a child? Indirectly, you're telling them that the way they and their family and maybe even their whole community speak is wrong, bad, and in need of fixing. Dang.

academia: hatin'

I'm currently feeling really frustrated by one of my classes. It's cross listed between the English and Curriculum & Instruction departments, but the only links to C&I are related to teaching first-year undergraduate writing studies courses -- and those links are few and far between. It really shouldn't be cross-listed.

And the readings, oy, the readings -- if I never think about rhetoric again it will be too soon. It's not my field, I'm not interested in this stuff. It's all academia for academia's sake, and although theoretically, I support the idea of people exercising their brains and engaging in pointless debates with one another, in practice, I'm just so sick of it. All these articles I'm reading have little-to-no relevance to my life as a teacher, which is what I came here to develop.

Besides that, I can't help but think about how much all these people are getting paid to think and write -- which again, theoretically, I support. But then I start daydreaming about how all that money could be going to our public schools (which is what I daydream about whenever I hear that someone's being paid an exorbitant salary), and I just feel disgusted.

The field of writing studies was developed to figure out what should be taught in first-year composition courses, but it has morphed into a weird conglomeration of texts on rhetoric. It's no longer doing anything practical for the world, except allowing more writing studies professors to get tenure (and oh, how I loathe tenure.) I know I should appreciate the fact that people can make money and build a life off of their ideas, but after being in the teaching trenches, I just don't support it.

The drop deadline is in a few weeks. I can't decide if I should stick it out (I really do like the professor) or jump ship.

inert knowledge

"Inert knowledge is knowledge that can usually be recalled when people are explicitly asked to do so but is not used spontaneously in problem solving even though it is relevant." --"Anchored Instruction and Its Relationship to Situated Cognition, by The Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt


...aka, most of what we learn in schools.

words that are[n't] words

I encountered an old frenemy today: the squiggly red line in Word, telling me that the jumble of letters I just typed has no real meaning. I had quite a few run-ins with the red squiggle in undergrad too. Please note, this is not because I'm a bad speller. I'm a pretty good speller (although, admittedly, I'm getting worse with age and more consistent use of auto-correct). The squiggled lines are underneath words that I sorta kinda made up -- but really, they make sense! And most of the time, professors don't notice (except once...I got an essay back with a word circled and a comment: "This is not a word.")

My favorite word that I made up in undergrad was "childization." I needed this word, though -- I was describing a woman (in a novel) who was being treated like a 5 year old by her husband. The closest word to it is "infantilization," but it felt inaccurate -- he wasn't treating her like an infant. I know that infantilization actually means to treat someone like a child, but it doesn't sound like that's what it means, so it felt wrong.

In the paper I just wrote, I had four red squigglies:

1. Rhetorics: Um, duh, this one is totally a word. It was even in the title of one of the articles I read recently. Suck it, Spellcheck.

2. Rhetors: Pretty self-explanatory: people who do rhetoric. Maybe this one shouldn't be a word, if only because I'm kinda sick of talking about rhetoric.

3. Memorialize: Brian correctly defined this one immediately, so that means it counts as a real word in my book.

4. Problematize: This is every grad student's favorite word: to create a problem or view something as a problem. On every grad student's diploma, you could replace their degree title with "Problematization" and they probably wouldn't mind.

one sex?

Weirdest thing I learned from grad school today:

Prior to the eighteenth century, people thought that there was only one sex, and men and women were both within that sex. They thought that women's bodies were "essentially male bodies" without the necessary "heat" for internal structures to become seen outside the body.

Basically, they thought the vag was an inverted, interior penis, so women were categorized as deformed men.

And that's my "wtf?" of the day.

wedding things that i despise

The color pool blue.
The word pew.
The idea of swags. (Even worse -- swags that hang on the church's pews.)
Things that are described as blingy.
Overlays. Seriously? You need a tablecloth on top of your tablecloth?
The concept of a boudoir photo shoot. Shudder.
High-boy tables. They just look silly.
All the horrific spelling on the wedding websites. It's TULLE people, not tool or tewl or toole.
The amazing amount of money that people spend on new stuff. Almost all (read: all but 3 things) of my wedding decorations are coming from garage sales and thrift stores. If I made a blog post called "wedding things that i love," the first thing on the list would be garage sales. If my mom reads this, she will undoubtedly be embarrassed for me. Whoops!

/endrant

Update: I just encountered the phrase "pew cones." ewewewewewewewEW.

on reading queer studies articles while planning a wedding

I've read a few articles lately for various classes that concern queer studies and its place in the classroom. Most of them were referring to the college composition classroom, but these ideas apply to younger grades as well.

The basic premise is that being anti-homophobia and LBGTQQ-inclusive is not enough in the classroom. By simply speaking out against the marginalization of LGBTQQ people, we are neglecting to examine how this oppressive discourse has affected everyone, including non-LGBTQQ people. Queerness in the classroom should also analyze how our society's oppression has shaped the identities of heterosexual people, which will hopefully lead to reconstructed notions of our identities and the heteronormative/heterosexist language we use.

Of course, the articles present many more nuances and issues that than, but that's the big idea that I took away. The first question that comes to mind when considering this is, what will this look like in my classroom? I struggled a lot when teaching at Rudy with issues of homophobia in the classroom. I was just barely scratching the surface of the first method that these articles mention (anti-homphobia in the classroom) and not even coming close to the second (analysis of how LGBT "othering" has affecting everyone's identities). At first, I was thinking that these practices needed to be implemented sequentially -- but now, I'm wondering if the second method could actually be used in order to shed light on the first; that is, if students consider how society's discourse around LGBT issues has defined their worldview, perhaps they would become less homophobic (although obviously, not all students are homophobic).

The second question I'm pondering is how can my wedding resist heteronormative discourse? It's tricky: I'm a chick marrying a dude. We have chosen to get married even though gay marriage is not legal in Illinois, a decision that I am not entirely comfortable with. We are going to be performing a lot of traditionally gendered activities. We're getting married by a Catholic priest (also he, himself, is not homophobic). To counter all this, I'm trying to use vendors that make their anti-homophobic views visible (for example, I'm STILL searching for a photographer who has pictures of a gay wedding up on their site). But it doesn't feel like enough. I guess it's far too much (and a bit ridiculous) to want my wedding to make people examine their identities as constructs of our heteronormative, oppressive society.



[edit]
Also, this:

Goals vs. Instruction

I'm reading an article entitled "Teaching and Learning Argumentative Reading and Writing: A Review of Research" by Newell et al, and I (really quickly) wanted to record a bit of research they discussed:

When having students write argumentative essays, several studies found that students with GOALS wrote better essays than students without goals; for example, half the kids had specific goals to cater towards their audience, or to refute the counterargument, etc. and the other half had no specific goal. They also found (separate study) that students with more elaborate, specific goals wrote better than students with vague goals.

Finally, a study was done where half students made goals and the other half did not; out of the students who made goals, half were given instruction on how to formulate an argument, and the other half were not. The goals group, as a whole, did better than the no-goals group. There was no difference between the students who received instruction and those who did not.

I've read several studies now for this class that concluded that instruction doesn't really make much of a difference. One of the other articles with this theme found that students who practiced collaborative reasoning (kind of like the Socratic Seminars we did at Rudy) performed BETTER on an argumentative essay than students who practiced collaborative reasoning AND had direct argumentation instruction. (Well, kinda: it's complicated. The CR only kids had more ideas, and more and better quality arguments. The CR + lesson kids had fewer ideas, but their arguments were more organized. What's the compromise that fosters tons of great ideas AND organization?)

So basically, if you teach it, they won't learn. If you let them think it through, they will learn.

Culturally Relevant Education

I've been thinking a million things I want to write about lately, but haven't found the time. Four classes = approx. 500 pages of reading per week = a slow and painful death.

Today in my evaluation class we briefly looked at a curriculum that is being developed for schools in Hawai'i and Kaua'i. It's designed as a culturally relevant science/Language Arts/art curriculum (and it seemed to have social-emotional standards to me as well) for 4th grade students. One of our professors (it's a co-taught course) is going to part of the team that evaluates this curriculum. From what I understand, it is being piloted in a super elite school: it's private, they spend about $39,000 per year per pupil (the Illinois average is about $10,000), and students must have a Hawaiian blood lineage prior to Hawaii becoming a US state. The program was designed for several purposes, one of which being that the native Hawaiian language(s?) is being used less and less; they fear that when the current generation of elders die out, the language (and, therefore, a large component of the culture) will die with them.

The curriculum consists of videos and accompanying graphic novels of a traditional Hawaiian story. There are also other books that (I believe) delve deeper into the science content (we did not get to view these materials). We watched the video of one of the stories: Menehune and the birds. Here's a very brief synopsis:

The Menehune people are small and can build things very fast; they are never seen. They have a close relationship with the forest and the birds. They pluck feathers from the birds to use in clothing and decorations, but they never pluck more than a few at a time, so the birds can still fly happily and produce more feathers. One day, men come from another tribe, kill many of the birds, and take all their feathers. The Menehune warriors (all men) find them, become invisible with the assistances of some leaves, beat them up mercilessly, and only spare their lives because they promise to make amends and restore the balance of the forest.

There are some great social lessons in this piece, as well as some that I winced at (gender norms, extreme violence). I got stuck on a few things as I considered the curriculum...

• I've been thinking about teacher and student cultures in one of my other classes as well, and I debated this a lot when I was teaching at Rudy: is it possible to successfully create and implement a culturally relevant curriculum when you (the teacher) are of a different culture than your students? If it is possible, it must take a LOT of work and learning and years immersing yourself in the culture. If it's not possible, did I do a disservice to my students simply by the fact of being their teacher? And what are the implications for my future jobs -- should I just apply to schools in the area where I grew up? Even there, the schools are diverse and I don't know all the cultures that the students bring. I know that sensitivity and openness to all are givens, but I would really love to be able to create a classroom where students can learn and demonstrate their understandings in their cultural style. (I could write forever about this, but I'm cutting myself off for now.)

• How can we (fairly) decide whose culture gets taught in the classroom? Our state standards have already decided this for us, but it's a singular culture that not all students relate to. In the video, the story that was told is a well-known one of Hawaiian culture -- similar to our folk tales (except it's real) or Bible stories. I was thinking about teaching at Rudy and talking to students about several Latino stories -- in particular, ghosts. It seemed like ghosts, and believing in them and their power in your life, were part of Latino culture. (You could say that a lot of people believe in ghosts, but they seem to have a more definite, stronger presence among the Latino students that I talked to.) However, if a student asked a science teacher to discuss the science behind ghosts, the teacher would probably say that there is none, and ghosts don't exist. Our bodies rot in the ground when we die. (At least, if they were speaking strictly according to the standards, they would say that.) We don't leave room for the truths of other cultures to mingle with Western truths, and we simply label them myths or falsehoods. For students who are connected to their cultures, this must create an awful tension -- which truth do I believe? It's funny, because if this argument were framed around Creationism vs. Evolution, I would probably not be quite so tolerant with older students...but really, what's the difference? They're all different truths, and are all reality to different people. How can we, as teachers, decide that we all need to stick to one truth?

technology sucks

brian and i have the worst printer on the face of the earth. it is the least intuitive piece of shiza i've ever had the unpleasant experience of dealing with. this is not good when you have to print over 100 pages of academic drivel every week.

anyone know of a place where i can covertly print for free at uiuc? (yeah, right...)

things i learned in the last 24 hours

1. It's kinda hard to read Master's-level articles when the people across the street are having an awesome party (especially when your boyfriend is having fun at that party.) I can probably name more songs from their playlist than things I learned from the article I was reading.

2. The girls who live downstairs from us really, REALLY like Britney Spears. Luckily, they don't wake up until noon-ish, so I have a few hours of quiet in the mornings.

3. I love timers. If I give myself half an hour to do internetty things and set an egg timer, I feel suuuuuper guilty about internetting after the timer goes off. Yes! Discipline! I can be a grown-up and get stuff done!

Against "National Breast Cancer Awareness Month"

Why on earth would anyone think that National Breast Cancer Awareness Month (NBCAM) is a bad thing?

Perhaps this is your first thought. It was mine, as well, as I started reading an article entitled "Resisting "National Breast Cancer Awareness Month': The Rhetoric of Counterpublics and their Cultural Performances" for my writing studies class. Don't worry -- this post won't get into the rhetorical strategies analyzed by the article or the notion of a counterpublic. It's just about cancer.

You probably know what NBCAM does: their motto is "early detection is the best prevention." They get a bunch of people to wear pink and talk about breast cancer without being embarrassed. They encourage women to get mammograms. They talk about the rates of hereditary breast cancer. All this stuff is great!

However, the motives and foundations of NBCAM are pretty shady. NBCAM is sponsored by AstraZeneca -- yeah, that huge (one of the top three in the world) pharmaceutical company. They started screening women for breast cancer back in the late 80s (pre-merger, when the company was just "Zeneca") primarily because early detection is way cheaper for the company's insurance bill. Goal #1 was economic, not humanitarian.

The other issue is the products of AstraZeneca: they sell the world's best selling cancer drug and they're one of the largest producers of pesticides in the US.

Why do the pesticides matter? Because they give us cancer. According to the article, even if we go with the (super-low skeptic's) estimate the 2% of cancers are due to environmental factors, those pesticides are still contributing to the deaths of 10,940 people per year.

Therefore, AstraZeneca is profiting all-around from the cancer cycle: they profit from the cause of cancer, they profit from the detection of cancer, and they profit from the treatment of cancer. DANG.

So yes, although NBCAM has helped breast cancer awareness make great strides, I just can't support it because of its sponsors. This pattern repeats itself all over society today -- the organization that causes the problem has also manufactured the solution. Oh, capitalism...when will we defeat you?

A group in the San Fran Bay Area has risen up against NBCAM, Toxic Links Coalition. (I'm not sure if they exist anymore...couldn't find much on the interwebs.) Their focus is that prevention is better than early detection. Their goal is to expose the icky roots of NBCAM, AstraZeneca, and other corporations that contribute to cancer-causing toxins.

evaluation of educational programs class

DANG! This one seems awesome. It has a good mix of Master's and Ph D students, and the coteaching professors have a nice balance. One has an evaluation background and the other has a curriculum background -- hopefully the curriculum prof will keep it grounded in practical application. But they both seem awesome, and the class has a good vibe -- very informal, yet very focused on the course content. The back-and-forth between the professors is complementary -- I would love to coteach someday with someone and pull it off like they do.

And we practiced by evaluating chocolate chip cookies! The way to win students over is definitely delicious food that pertains to the content :)

Notable moments from the class:

• It seems like several people have had experience with scripted curriculum. I always knew that these existed and was horrified by them, but I was disgusted anew today. If it came down between not having a teaching gig at all and working at a school with a scripted curriculum, I would probably rather be unemployed.
• I'm interested in evaluating higher education programs for preservice teachers, as I would eventually like to teach undergrad preservice teachers. At the same time, I dislike the notion of merit pay or judging teachers solely on their students' performance. I didn't realize (until this class) that evaluating higher ed programs for preservice teachers could possibly be doing just that -- judging the teacher on the student's performance. Hmm. I will have to think critically and carefully about what goes in to the preservice teacher program evaluations, and the purpose of them -- would my evaluation lead to improving the programs? Would it simply judge them? Would it unfairly judge the professors?
• This last part can't be explored in one post, or even in one lifetime: What is the purpose of schooling? (similar to the ideas I began exploring in my "what is a graduate education?" post, but this is the historical perspective)
• Initially (and still in many institutions today), it was the "Old Humanist" perspective. Education is in place to teach traditional academics. This probably falls in line most closely with the banking method of teaching -- you are an empty mind who has come to me, the all-knowing teacher, to be filled with knowledge.
• Then it moved to the social efficiency model, which had economic connections. You should be educated so that you can best perform your job. The professors didn't mention when this idea was popular, but I'm betting that it was around the time cars were invented and Ford's assembly-line model became popularized. You are educated just enough to be economically valuable, and (I'm hypothesizing), you are taught how to be a good member of society: how to shut up, sit down, and not think independently.
• Next was the developmentalist, "child centered" focus. I didn't quite catch this -- I think it means to educate the student according to their level of development. 
• And the social Meliorist/social reconstructionist view: schools should be focused on the betterment of society. Apparently this was popular until the 1930s, and then was viewed as socialist and quickly became very unpopular.

I feel that, today, many of the professional development resources I've encountered push for the social efficiency model, and I never really thought much about their motives. (I would consider my teaching style somewhere between the social efficiency and social Meliorist models.) All of the PD that pushes for "21st century skills" is all about the social efficiency: how will these students need to behave in the workplace, and how can we best prepare them for it? Teamwork, collaboration, technology skills, ability to adapt to new technologies, creativity, ingenuity -- these are all highly praised by the "21st century skills" PD people. And it's making me realize that I've never attended a corporate professional development workshop on how to create a classroom of students who will help the world become a better place.

Luckily, the school that I taught at WAS focused on the importance of the social Meliorist model (although we never use those terms), and we had a few PD sessions done by external and internal people on how our curricula can improve society. Go us!

a grad class as i imagined it

After the early afternoon class horror show, I was reeeeally hoping that my last class of the day would be at the appropriate level for me. And, YAY! It was! It's a course on the Trends and Issues in Elementary Language Arts/Literacies. There's a nice mix of doctoral and Master's students (well, just a few Master's kids, but a few is better than none!) and many of them are currently teaching.

THAT is how I hoped and imagined grad school would be: current teachers, doc researchers, and ex-teachers (like myself) sitting around and discussing issues related to education. We read some stuff prior to class and spent some class time relating the points in the readings to our experiences. We talked about actual examples of things that go on in classrooms, struggles we had, successes we found, and so on. Okay, cool -- this is the stuff that (as it progresses) has the potential to concretely make me in to a better teacher. Sweet!


A friend posted this link on facebook. Some of it seems right on, and some of it is questionable. But now it's time to do the dishes.
Thing to study and comment on later: http://www.mastersdegree.net/grade-inflation/
Another thing to think about later: Leaving murdered bugs on the bathroom floor: does it REALLY deter more bugs from coming inside?

a master's kid in a ph.d world

As soon as I got back from this class, I went straight for the nutella. I desperately needed comfort food.

It wasn't a class I had registered for. After not loving that Soc class yesterday, I decided I wanted to keep my options open. I looked for more classes and found this cross-listed writing studies/curriculum and instruction course. The class was full, but I emailed the prof and she was gracious enough to say sure! come to class! oh, btw, everyone else will have read this book that I told them about a week ago. And it's not in the bookstore. But no biggie!

However, it was a biggie. A big biggie. Everyone else in the class (with the exception of 1 person, maybe) was a doctoral student, and they almost all had experience with doing research. I felt so incredibly lost. I have not had a tenth of the academic experiences that these people have, and it would have significantly impacted my performance in the class. Needless to say, I will not be going back.

As I was riding my bike home, I thought about why this class was so different than the two I've gone to and will continue attending. A big part of it is the expectation that I'm already doing a certain type of work, and this class will be a continuation, not a beginning. The nutella is helping me remember that I'm not dumb, I'm just a first year Master's student. And that is a significantly different place to be at than a fourth year doc student.

It also makes me wonder about the non-academic experiences that these people may have had (or not had). In my program (I can't really call it a cohort), I am one of 4 students who is not seeking a Master's + certification. That means (most likely), that there are only 4 people who have taught before (if that; I've spoken with two of the others: one hasn't done any teaching, and the other taught for 6 months.) I'm in an odd place. In some classes and in some ways, I feel like my teaching experience puts me at a major advantage; in other classes, my noobie-ness is terribly apparent.

Ah well. Someday I'll be at that doc level. Many, many years from now.

citations

A teacher mentioned his preferred citation style in class the other day (University of Chicago), and he commented that the various citation styles influence the style of the piece of writing and the thought process of the author. I have absolutely zero idea what this means. I know that MLA and APA exist; I now know that University of Chicago style exists; and I am pretty sure that when I was in undergrad, I just used a mish-mash of styles or 'my own' citation style. So, although this is not very interesting to me (at all), I should definitely learn what these different styles are and how they affect the writing.

(Why can't we just throw down our own ideas and call it a day? Who cares about being cited, getting credited for the ideas? This is what irks me about higher education -- it's more about competition than collaboration. Someone should do a study to find out whether competition or collaboration results in higher student achievement.)

what is a graduate education?

This is a topic I want to explore more in-depth when I have time (I'm currently scrambling to do readings that the professor assigned before the first day of class). After attending two more "syllabus day" classes, I started to consider what the graduate college wants out of me, and what I want out of it.

What I want:

• to become a better teacher. This includes studying a little bit of theory (but ONLY when discussing it in the context of actual experiences) and a lot of practical stuff. I want strategies. I want examples of successful assessments. I want to study and poke holes in grading systems. I want to think about all the crap I did wrong when I was teaching and to figure out how I'm going to do it better when I go back to teaching in a few years.
• to prepare myself for my Ph.D. Although this is probably a few years (or many years) away, I have a lot of questions to ask. I want to eventually teach pre-service teachers at the college level, and I think that a lot of universities do a shit job of this. I want to figure out how to do it right. 
• One of the classes I went to today (EPSY 400) allows grad students who are taking it for 4 credit hours to do a research project proposal on any topic that relates to learning. I was a bit hesitant about staying in the class (I loathe syllabus days), but this totally open ended project has me hooked. I've got a dozen ideas already, but I'll probably end up studying preservice teacher programs -- as in, what kind of program produces better teachers: theory-based or practical-based? (That definitely needs rewording. I don't remember how to write academically yet.)

What does grad school want out of me? Thus far, it seems to vary depending on the class...

• Writing Studies wants me to be creative, to explore metawriting, and to learn about writing in the context of a buncha sweet topics (social protest, veganism advertising, feminist rhetoric). It wants me to learn about what I want to learn about (in the context of texts).
• Psychology of Learning in Education wants me to know who's who in the land of educational psychologists. It wants me to fight about Piaget and Vygotsky's theories. It wants me to fall in love with the Japanese school system. And the best part, as I mentioned above, it wants me to explore my own ideas in relation to learning. 
• In case you couldn't tell, I seriously can't wait to get started on that proposal. I think it will be hugely helpful since I want to write a dissertation next year.
• Okay, so to recap: thus far, the coolest parts of grad school are where I get to learn about stuff I'm personally interested in and do projects on them. Basically, stuff I always wanted to do when I was teaching, but didn't have the time or support for.
• Sociology of Education: hmm. I think this class wants me to be a sociologist first and an educator second. It wants me to write summaries, which, as a teacher, I kind of cringe at (great for a starter, but c'mon, let me do some critical thinking!) I think....that this class wants me to drop it. Ah well, that's why I signed up for 2 extra classes anyway.

first day

School related: had one class yesterday, Writing Studies, with a prof I had in undergrad. I decided to take a class with him because he was awesome at inspiring creativity, and I want to study that for when I teach again. He's really open about the syllabus, very flexible, and makes students feel good about having their own, off-the-beaten-path ideas.

When I had him, 6 or 7 years ago, it was the first class he'd ever taught, and I learned so much about how to be a first year teacher from him. (Of course, I forgot it all and didn't do anything like him during my first year.) He revised the syllabus with us when we were bored or stuck, he listened very carefully to all of our suggestions, and he really made us feel like we owned the class. We definitely enjoyed his class, and that ownership/happiness lead to a lot of creative projects.

It seems like this class will work pretty much just like the other class I had with him - yay!

Not school related: Paid tuition. Holy shiza. I feel like a grownup. Made a budget. I've had budgets before, but I never actually needed to stick to them, haha. I'm going to try to keep my monthly spending below $840 -- including rent, groceries, utilities, going out to eat, phone bill, everything. I might have to adjust that, but it's the goal.

I've been working out pretty much, almost every day -- running, swimming at the ARC outdoor pool, and playing racquetball (my arm is sooooo soooooooore). I can see how it would be VERY easy to be VERY sedentary as a grad student -- sleep late (my earliest class is 1pm), read, class, sleep.

Also, it's easy to spend all morning doing non-school stuff -- wedding planning, laying around, budgeting, whatever. I'm going to have to keep track of my time once the reading gets more intense.