papers. woohoo.

Still here. I wrote a paper about the effect of parent involvement in
student achievement. And tonight I am writing about women pirates,
whaling and the gender and racial issues involved in those. woohoo.

Thanksgiving is coming up. It's very exciting.

quitting

I called today and quit my part-time job. No more. It's a bit of built-up frustration and a bit of overwhelming amount of work and commitments. But it's time. Funny, though. The last job I quit was in high school, in it was also after about three months. After I hung up the phone with the store manager, I felt a weird sense of disappointment, sadness and relief. I like the relief. I'm not sure if the other two are good signs. Either way, my life is gaining more stability now, and that's good. It needs that.

I'm sorry that I haven't been writing as much the last month. I was overwhelmed and confused and frustrated. I'll try to do better. It's because of my lack of organization and the lack of stability that I had to ask for an extension on my first paper for one of my education classes. It's not a good feeling. I haven't had to ask for an extension since .... first semester junior year? But the thing that bothered me about the extension is not that I asked for one, it's that I had to ask for one because I didn't even know there was a paper due. Sure, I'm aware that one is due at some point because the professor handed out topic suggestions, but I had no idea it was TOMORROW.

So that's bad. I need to get my life in order.

On the other hand, I taught third graders adverbs Wednesday. As predicted my me and my lead teacher, there were about 10 kids who got it. The rest just kinda looked at me like I was insane. No biggie, kids. I didn't get it until high school. You got awhile to pick it up. I  thought the lesson went well, though, and I got mostly positive feedback from the lead teacher. Her main concern is that I wasn't using positive strategies to curb behavior and lack of attention. I thought that the group work was more chaotic than I planned for, and I planned for a lot of chaos, but the lead teacher said it was fine. I guess third graders aren't quite used to having to work in groups for classwork yet. The lead teacher did say that my thinking the night before to assign tasks (writer, speaker, corrector) in the groups would've made it less chaotic. I think the keywords in third grade are "specific instructions."

Overall, a crappy week.

ALIVE! ... but very cold

I'm alive! Well, after my ridiculous allergy bout with beechwood .... but that's something I'll have to tell y'all later. Right now, I'm starving and in need of substenance (did I spell that right?). And change so I can go to work. And stuff. School is going well. One of the kids got his first secret admirer notes a couple of weeks ago. It caused much drama. :) Classes are going OK. This week in my really hard history colloquium, we're reading the professor's book. I hate it when profs do that. And wouldn't you know it -- there are no used copies of the book on sale at the bookstore .... when there are MANY STILL available for the other 10 (or 15 ... something like that) books that we had to read. But I'm done griping.

Again. I'm alive. And breathing. And I bought a warm jacket to tide me through the fall ... snow'll have to wait. It's REALLY, REALLY cold in this city. It's OCTOBER. Argh.