Semester Three

I don't even know where to begin other than to say that I have one week of this semester in the bag. I think that I may have bitten off more than I can chew. For me even to admit that, is a big step. At this time last month my teaching load had dropped from 2 courses to 1 so I was kind of scrambling to find a little work to act as a filler. I have one position on campus that I work 20 hours at, and 10 hour graduate assistantship. I only registered for 6 credits, so I was waffling between added another 3 credits or just taking it a little easy with the one course.

I mentioned the cancellation of this course to one of my supervisors, who then and there offered me a great opportunity to become an online course developer. I would work with a faculty member on campus, take their existing face-to-face course and make it 100% online with the help of all of the university's resources at my disposal. Great! I'll do it. I watched them do this last year with 6 courses and it looked like a great opportunity. On top of all of this, I could work on a course that I have a good comprehension of, Western Civ. Things are really looking up. On top of this, the course developer position pay is more than the pay for the course that got dropped from my teaching load. Great, I will be ahead of the monetary game this semester.

So then last Friday rolls around, and my supervisor for the course development comes to me and offers me a second course to develop. Sweet! And it is another history course, though this time not in an area I am familiar with, Africa, but one that looks to be very interesting. At this point all I can see is dollar signs flashing and a few bills that I have showing a $0 balance. Things really seem to be looking up for me.

So I go into the weekend happy, but a little busy, trying to finish prepping as much as I can for the class that I am teaching. I also wanted to give the house a thorough cleaning and take down the Christmas decorations. The domestic goddess in me goes on hiatus when the semester starts and won't return for a few months. On Saturday morning, as I am taking lights off the tree, I get a phone call from the college that I teach at. It is the Dean of Faculty. He tells me that the section I had dropped was reopened the night before due to enrollment being too large in another section. How would you like to have this course back on you teaching assignment? Silly me, thinking only about the money that I would be making, said yes. Now, I would be teaching a course that I just finished teaching two sections of last semester. I can very easily prep for the course. But it does require me to do all of the grading.

So now I am taking 6 credits, teaching 6 credits, developing 6 credits, working 10 hours a week as a graduate assistant, and 20 hours a week in IT. This really isn't too different from last semester, but it just feels overwhelming. This on top of the idea that in both of my classes I am the only doc student, so the professor for each has assigned me an extra paper. I expected that, but it still doesn't help matters. On the bright side, this semester I only have one faculty member that I am working for as a graduate assistant.

Say It Isn't So...

So, back to reality. After two weeks of doing nothing related to my own academic career other than dealing with all of those loose pieces of paper floating in folders and my saddle bag (my backpack), it is time to get back into school mode. Unfortunately this is not something that I can be eased back into. I have back to back meetings basically for the rest of this week while I also need to prepare the course that I am teaching this spring. I have never taught the course before and over the break two of the four books were changed out. Unfortunately they dropped Maus, which I love teaching. It was replaced by another graphic novel that I enjoy, Persepolis, but I have not taught that one before. So here I am, less than a week away from the start of the semester and I am trying to throw together a course calendar. The other works that we will be tackling are Night, An Ordinary Man, and a few Greek tragedies that I haven't read since high school. If you have any insights, they are welcome. Needless to say, teaching this course will make this an interesting semester. My own classes also start next week as well. I am looking forward to having two faculty members that I have not had in years. I have one education course and one history course, hopefully allowing me to have more of a balance in my mental paradigms.

Again my love of PhD Comics cannot be captured in mere words, but below I have a comic that sums up yesterday:

Grades

I finally got up the courage to look at my grade report from this past semester. Now, when you are at my stage in grad school, grades really don't matter. I mean, you should always get A's and B's in grad school, but it's not as important as it was in undergrad or even when I got my master's. I was not in a hurry to look. I had 6 credits this semester, so only two letters. I know that this semester I did not do my best. I had bit off more than I could chew with everything I was working on. I knew that I did not turn in my best work. This is what makes me sad. For the first time in my graduate career, I feel like I turned in a piece of work that was two steps above garbage. I hate this feeling. I know that there was nothing that I could have done by the end of the semester other than turn in my rough draft. Needless to say, I was not very happy with one of my grades. Hopefully this is the kick in the pants I need to finish the second half of this school year. On the other hand I am dealing with crossing between two disciplines that have very different research paradigms that can conflict and leave me feeling like the student in the cartoon below:

Merry Christmas from PhD Comics

This just made me smile and I thought I would share it with all of you. As the Christmas season begins, and the parties and gatherings commence, so do my favorite questions: "So how much longer until you graduate?" "What do you actually do?" and "What's your dissertation on?" While most people are just trying to be polite, it is frustrating to come up with an answer that is one sentence or less to not have to explain graduate school to someone who never went to college. Any hints?

It's Over

Well my semester is over, and I am sitting here waiting for one of the schools that I work for to fix their email system so I can access late student work, grade it, and recalculate a few students' grades. Overall this semester should not have been anything too different from last year. I mean last year I had one less job, but one more class, plus I got married during the middle of one of the semesters. Yet this fall I just seemed to slack off more, rather than focusing more. It makes me scared for what the next few years hold. I have to take stock in the fact that I have completed 24 doctoral credits, have six more waiting for me this spring, leaving me with 15-18 left of course work to go, ever! After that I have my doctoral qualifying exams and dissertation to complete which equal another 12-15 credits. All total I need 60 credits to graduate, and I am still on schedule to graduate in May of 2012. I know my ticker on the bottom of the page is not correct, but the site did not have enough digit spaces to put in 2012 as a year. To give you all a treat, here is the conclusion to my 25 pager:


"While some of these activities, such as the shorted lived John Muir Club, were representative of the time, yearbook, newspaper, and sports are staples of the traditional American high school experience. These were all fully represented at GTTHS, in a time when not all of these activities were available even to other high school girls within the same city. Milwaukee Girls’ Trade and Technical High School, because of its nature as an all girls’ school, was able to more quickly respond to the needs of its students. Rather than be an institution of repression, the development of clubs and other activities was progressive in responding to the needs of its students. These activities, though an extension of the curriculum and social life of the women, were vital to the development of the future wives, mothers, and employees that were enrolled."


I know that you were hanging with baited breath to figure out what I had found this semester.

2 Weeks and Counting...

With two weeks left in the semester here is a list of things to be done by December 12th:

• 10 page paper on the AAGPBL - due Friday December 5th at noon. (I have 4 pages typed so far.)


• 25 page paper on GTTHS's extracurricular activities - defended December 4th, submitted December 11th. (I have 7 pages so far.)


• 5 page take home final exam - due Friday December 12th at 3:30.


• Grade 21 final unit lesson plans by December 12th, they are due Sunday December 7th.


• Finish grading 15 2 page papers by tomorrow.


• Grade 33 3-5 page essays, ASAP.


• Grade 33 writing portfolios by Friday December 12th.


• Select three portfolios to share with writing faculty: one A portfolio, one C portfolio, and one failing portfolio.


• Submit all of the above grades for the lesson plans and portfolios.


• Type up 20 pages of hand written notes and submit to my cooperating professor, then begin hunting through the microfilm for stories about the school board I have been researching for him.

This is all in the next two weeks. I am already tired just writing it out.

On a more positive note I found a cartoon that best describes one of my positions here at the university.

Personal, Sort of...

I have been getting help over the past few months for some health issues, and though they are not following my timeline for how things should go, I am finding the whole process very interesting. The most interesting part was attending the support group meeting last night. This is where this blog comes in. How do I explain what I do for a living without sounding like a pretentious a**hole, or like a workaholic? I mean it is easy to say that I teach college and I am a doc student. When I use the term "instructor" so many assumptions are made. My other position is a little more complicated to explain to anyone, much less non-academics. When I tell people that I am working on my research they think that I spend all of my time in a laboratory, not the reading room of an archive. When I start talking about what I do to correct the assumptions, I get that eyes glazed over look of sheer boredom. How can I find a happy medium? Should I just go back to saying that I am a teacher and not answer any other questions? I guess that my life will be a little easier when I can say professor.