FINALLY back to school this week
...but not until Wednesday. Argh! I need the structure, and I need the feeling of moving toward that ultimate goal, because I don't like stagnant. [you'll read the rest of this and think to yourself "stagnant, my ass!" and that's true, but I think of things on multiple tracks]
This is not to say that my schedule is not full of things to do—I'm behind on the 3rd edition of one of my books, I'm behind on one of my projects for a prof, I haven't even started working with another prof (that's not fault, though...it's on her schedule), but I
am almost done with another project I was working on with a prof and we did really good work on that one. I'll say more when her manuscript is off to the publisher at the end of the week.
I started language classes via distance ed [
Mel snarkily said, "we used to call those correspondence courses" but I prefer the term "distance ed" otherwise it sounds like I'm studying at home for my nail technician certificate or something. Not the case (no offense to nail technicians)]. My French is rusty, you see—hell, it was rusty when I took the classes originally as an undergrad fifteen years ago. However, I dutifully worked through some refresher workbooks and felt confident of my translation-with-a-dictionary skills. Except that's not the test here—it's one of those WebCAPE progressively-difficult fill-in-the-blank tests. I suck at those tests. SUCK at them. Actually, I suck at any kind of bubble-in-the-answers test, which is why my GRE scores suck. Anyway, I decided that it would be better for me in the long run just to retake the required number of French credits—because at the next school I'll have to go through the whole "prove it" process again and it'll just be easier with the credits on a transcript.
Except...language classes are predominantly during the daytime hours, or if they're in the evening they conflict with my grad seminars.
Everywhere. I checked into every community college and open-enrollment university in a hundred-mile radius (that's not a small number of schools in these parts), and nada. There was nothing at all I could work into a schedule.
So I turned to the internet. Oh internet, how I love thee. Well, that and the
World Wide Learn listing of open enrollment distance ed classes. After developing my own decision matrix (weighing cost, availability of instructors, ability to accelerate, number of classes available in the sequence, and a general sense of shit-together-ness) I picked UT-Austin. Hook 'em horns. So I'm flying through French classes and will have that on my transcript rather than the extreme anxiety of either taking a placement test or driving all over creation. Hooray for distance ed! [Also, I'm taking Latin from another school, because I LOVE LATIN. I had two semesters of that as an undergrad as well. I dig languages.]
So I guess school
has started for me already, but the actual act of going to campus and hanging out with students and participating in discussions—not until Wednesday.
