Tag Archives: school

anotherdegree

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well, maybe that title is getting a little ahead of itself. maybe i won’t actually get anotherdegree. but in any case, i AM back in school. or i will be, starting next tuesday. i’ll still be working the same job i have been; i’ll just be taking a couple classes each semester on the side. something to keep the ol’ grey cells happy. you know how it goes.

i’ll be getting a degree in education, with the aim of getting into policy and reform. not teaching. i know a lot of people think that education administration should be enacted by teachers, but i don’t want to teach. i tried it once for a short while, and it was fun—but i have bigger changes in mind, bigger grievances i want to see worked out. ideally, i’d get this degree and then get to work for the dept of education and try and bring about systematic evaluation and reform. i think we have a lot of great teachers in this country—i have benefited from them personally—but something about the system cripples them. so let’s fix the system. i don’t think you have to be a teacher to do that. i think you can be a parent, an investor, a researcher, a student, an adult, a child. yes, teachers need to be part of the process, but creative minds enact change, too. if it eases your mind, think of it this way: i’ve been a student so long, i’ll bring that perspective.

studying education should be interesting since, typically, education policymakers tend to be liberal and/or democrats. and i, in case you are new to the anothernicole rodeo, am neither of those. but i think i’m open-minded, and i know i’m opinionated, so it should make for some good discussions.

at present i am most strongly against teacher unions (*ducks*) and the idea that one system will work for the entire country. when the student body in california looks like the student body in vermont we can talk about making everything the same. in the meantime, i think we should embrace our diversity and look for diverse ways to solve one massive problem. but you know me: all kinds of ideas, very little data. we’ll see how that changes as i get myself edumacated.

yay, school!

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starting on january 27, i will (kinda) be back in school! woot! okay, so not working towards a degree or anything like that. i don’t even know if i’m actually considered a student. but i will be taking a literature class at the extension school, and that’s good enough for me.

i’m taking “cross-cultural studies in the novel” — and from the reading list it looks like it’ll be pretty awesome — we’ll be reading novels from across two centuries and five countries. i am ridiculously excited. you should expect a lot of posts about things we talk about in class or themes i pick up on as i read. also a fair amount of whining about writing formal essays as this class happens to be writing-intensive. brace yourselves. muhahaha.

we’ll start with Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and move to Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, Great Expectations, Jude the Obscure, Wharton’s The Custom of the Country, The Great Gatsby (woot!), Larsen’s Passing, Mukherjee’s Jasmine, and The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency.

i feel like cameron in 10 things i hate about you: “and i’m back in the game!”

lazy-good-for-nothin’

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im sitting in the HRC reading room, which normally i love — it’s one of those places where i just feel so much more intelligent by just being in the room — but i’m not feeling (and im certainly not being) intelligent at all today. im swamped with this paper, and the irony is not lost on me.

the paper itself is, yes, a big deal. its worth 60% of my grade. (parenthetical irony: this grade matters to me even though i already have a graduate degree; i dont want this one; i dont even remotely care about the topic; and i cant imagine being less interested in any subject except Botany, which i got a D in in college).

anyway so the paper is a big deal. but i’ve written bad papers before, and i have no scruples about doing it again. you write rubbish, turn it in, your professor is disappointed and you feel mediocre, you get a bad grade, and you get over it. its not the end of the world.

so this paper shouldn’t be such a big deal. except that its a mock conference paper (with an emphasis on “mock” in my case) and so we have to give a 20 minute presentation on our paper to the class. aye, there’s the rub. i can’t stand up in front my quasi-peers and present rubbish! i’d die of mortification. ironically, the presentation is entirely ungraded.

so im stressed about a class i dont care about, for a degree i dont need, and a paper i don’t mind blowing off, because of a presentation that doesnt actually count. the futility meter is going haywire.

but the point of all this is to say that i am discouraged; and i am struggling with the research; and i do think it might be too much to work 40 hours a week and be in grad school, even part time, if you’re as high strung as i am. which i obviously am. so today’s theme is that i really am thinking about dropping out.

ive never dropped out of school before, but im thinking it can’t be too hard. 16 year olds do it all the time.