Question 1: Testing

I've made it fairly well known that I have changed my career path from photojournalist to teacher. But let's just make that switch official, okay? No more photojournalist-y crap (okay, maybe sometimes). Let's start talking about education. In particular, testing. I just took my first test of the semester. It was for a journalism course and pretty much all short answer. I didn't study as much as I should have, especially with respects to a few sections of content, but I think I did fairly well. Yay me! One of the things that really helped me was having a test the teacher used two years ago to study from. Yeah. Fairly sure if I didn't have that, I would have failed. Basically. So that got me thinking.

I'm going to be a high school English teacher, right? And part of that will be testing my students. How far should I go to make sure they're prepared for the tests? Testing isn't just a reflection of the students' performance, it is a reflection of my performance. If I'm not teaching something properly, it will show in the tests and I will have to adjust my teaching style for that. Does offering a study guide help the students or does it just hurt them? Like I said, had I not had the test from a few years ago to guide my studying, I probably would have failed. The questions I got right were basically verbatim ones from her old tests. So should I offer old tests to students as study guides? Should I even have study guides?

The student in me panics thinking of taking a course without study guides, or poorly constructed study guides. I love study guides. I know what professors want me to focus on then. I know what they want from me and what I should take from this course. And isn't that the part of testing? To make sure students know what you need them to know? But the teacher part of me wonders how much students learn if you're guiding them with such a heavy hand. I took a statistics course my first semester in college and the professor made at least 4 years of tests available to us. And I diligently worked my way through all of them before each test as an alternative to conventional studying. It worked well. I got an A in that class without much effort outside of taking all those tests. But now? I'm not sure how helpful I'd be to someone struggling in that course. I don't remember much.

It's because I never had to think critically about the content of the course. So then my challenge as a teacher is to get my students to think critically but also simply regurgitate what I need them to do for the standardized tests. Can this be accomplished through short answer tests alone? I think not. So can I get them to regurgitate by taking tests and critically think by writing essays? Is it fair to break the course down like that? When I think back to my favorite English courses, I remember them being structured similarly. I remember learning the most this way. But that's just how I learn, not how everyone learns. If I structure my course in the way I learned best, how can I make sure that everyone learns well? Projects and group work and fun little time fillers only do so much to help the rest of the class learn. It's a difficult balance to find, but if I can identify all this after only a month in the teaching program, I think I'm off to a solid start. Besides, the school district will have so many restrictions on what and how I can teach, I doubt most of this will matter (jk...kinda...a little bit...tongue in cheek? yes).

Death of an Era

So my laptop died. Majorly. I was being my nerdy self and watching the latest episode of The Guild on Tuesday morning and all of a sudden, boom, colors invert, laptop freezes. I know what you're thinking. Macs don't freeze! They get the spinning wheel of death and are fine after 30 seconds! How is this possible? I wasn't too bothered by it, except that I had just gotten to a very interesting part in the episode and now had to reload it. What a nuisance!

Except simply restarting the machine didn't work. I got a strange screen. Striped green and pink-ish background with a small overlay telling me to restart. So I tried resetting a couple of things. Same screen. Well, it's Windows partitioned, let's boot it up with that. I can get to the screen that allows me to choose which OS to boot the laptop into, but if I try to boot Windows it restarts. How funky. I think it might be an issue with that. I take it to Tiger Tech. They tell me it's a motherboard issue. Right. Because Macs totally have motherboards (hint: Apple is far too hipster to use the term motherboard, even if they basically function the same). So I take it to Geek Squad who charges me 70 bucks and says they've fixed it roughly 24 hours later. And they have. I go to class and take notes and check Facebook and everything is good. Until I play a YouTube video (okay, tell me exactly when did Far East Movement become popular? All of a sudden they're everywhere and I'm kinda missing the days when they weren't b/c I liked them more). Then it does the same thing - inverts colors, freezes, after a reset I see the same screen.

So I go to Best Buy again and they set me up to have the thing shipped off and we're almost done when I ask how long it will take. Two to three weeks. I stare at the guy helping me. He's kidding, right? He has to be. He explains it's usually not a matter of diagnosing the problem, but more the obtaining of parts. I grab my laptop, say thank you, and walk on out of there. Well, not exactly, but basically. The guy gave me the number and location of the closest Apple authorized repair shop and refunded my money, but I did grab my laptop right out of his hands and said okay, thank you, I can't do that.

So now the laptop is at this random out of the way repair shop. They finally tell me the proper term for what my laptop is doing - kernel panic. It's most likely an issue with the video part of the logic board, which is a known defect on my particular model so they'll fix it for free. That's what I find out after 2 minutes of being there. I spent 10 minutes at Tiger Tech to have an ignorant person talk to me and at least 30 minutes at Best Buy working with 3 different Geek Squad members and I just open my laptop, show the front desk lady the issue, she flips the laptop over and checks the specific type and tells me all I need to know. And I go back less than a day later (about 50 hours after the official crash now) to get a few files off the laptop and the 2nd in command comes over and explains everything they're doing to my laptop. And tells me I should have it back on Monday. Or Tuesday. But most likely Monday.

Now I'm just worried that even though they'll fix everything (for free!) and none of the data has been corrupted that my laptop won't be the same. I love this laptop, even though it's a pain in the ass most of the time. I really need a computer to communicate with people. Any assignments from this week have been half-assed because I don't have my laptop. I don't have everything I need to do my job correctly. I need to be able to go home and organize my thoughts and email certain people asking certain things and I just can't do that when I'm in a computer lab. But what if I can't do that the same way after this logic board replacement?

So this is the death of the blog. Until Tuesday. Hopefully. Most likely.

ENTP

Do you remember when we had to do the personality typing in middle and high school? I must have had to take different tests in different classes at least 3 times. And then we'd take the tests that tell us which jobs we'd like that would match with our personalities? Yeah, those tedious things. On different days, in different years, I'd get different results. I would be introverted instead of extroverted. I would get judging instead of perceiving. But the intuition and thinking never changed.

I'm fairly certain what I've put in the title is my type. I'm extroverted, intuitive, thinking, and perceiving. I walk an incredibly fine line between introversion and extroversion, and I'm sure as hell judgmental a lot of the time, but at my core, that is what I am. I think the extroversion has happened more recently. I'm returning to the outward display of my emotions. Which makes for some interesting interactions with people.

Like when I was talking to a few Geek Squad guys about my laptop (yeah, that's how messed up it is. I got to talk to more than one of them). I'd happily bounce from explaining the start-up sound to what I was doing when the laptop died to animatedly showing what it's doing now...I was very bubbly about it all. And when they gave me good news ("Well it's not the motherboard..."), I'd spin around and be all happy. And when they gave me bad news ("...mainly because Macs don't have motherboards. It's probably the drive board, which is kind of like the motherboard."), I'd nearly fall to the ground. The perceiving is a little bit more difficult for me to determine, and I'm not certain I'm not judging. I'm really judging, guys. I judge people a lot. But I also like to claim I'm perceptive. And I guess when it boils down to it, women are typically more perceiving and non-judgmental so that's my explanation for that.

I was surprised to find that a close friend is an ESFJ. We're almost exact opposites. It made me wonder if she as well was close to being the opposite on a few of those. I always thought she was more perceiving and maybe perhaps a bit on the more intuitive side. Definitely feeling. But it got me thinking, maybe people aren't as they seem. I'm not sure people would say I'm ENTP, though I myself know I am. It's the perceiving that would really throw them off. I guarantee it. Would you have guessed that I am an ENTP?  Do you think people would guess what you are?

Rawr!

That is all. Good day.

It's not really all. It's a combination of my ex being a butthead, the just-a-friend still texting me, drama between two good friends who have a history together and getting placed in the friend zone with the crush. I am really frustrated and I say to hell with boys!

But really. That's all.

Oh Hello There

I dunno about y'all, but I just stare at the butts in this commercial. They're all so perfect and round. I wonder how they cast that. "No, we don't need to see your face, just turn around and...yeah...no, no that's not quite what we're looking for. Nice legs though. Thanks. Next!" But that got me thinking! No matter the gender, I notice people's hair and eyes. I really like hair and eyes. They're so cool.

I love looking at wavy hair, probably because I don't have it myself. I like how it moves. It seems so much more fun than straight hair. I think brown hair that gets red in the sunlight is the coolest thing ever. So if it's wavy and that amazing auburn? Holy crap, watch out, I will stare at you. But that's not to say I don't like straight hair, because I do. I like how sleek and shiny it can be. It just looks so wonderfully soft. I look at guy's short peach fuzz hair and wonder how it feels. Each peach fuzz head feels a little different, I think. I don't like the weird two-tone trend. Where you have dark on top and light under. It looks stupid. And streaky highlights are bad as well. Don't do the in-between - either keep your hair color (looking) natural, or dye it all hot pink, you know? Dreads are cool and choppy haircuts make me want to run over and mess it all up and watch you restyle it.

I'm weird. I acknowledge this.

And eyes! Good god, eyes are amazing. It's kind of funny that you have to see eyes by using eyes. I have pretty eyes. My dad and my brother have bluer eyes than I do, but my eyes do something rather cool. They're more grey than anything else, but when I wear something blue/teal, watch out! BAM! They're super blue. Green eyes are so mysterious. I feel like they look deeper into your eyes than any other color. I'm not sure why. I feel so on edge if someone around me has green eyes. Hazel eyes are like blue eyes in that they come in so many varieties and depending on the color you wear they look different. My mom's are a green-brown, my friend's are a green-blue, and I remember meeting someone with green-gold. Brown eyes are kinda iffy for me. I really like bright brown eyes, if that makes sense. But I think a lot of brown eyes are boring.

So I dunno. There's that. What are some things you notice right away about others?

静かに！

So today in class a professor made a negative comment that I'm sure was directed at me. And it hurt. Because I really do try in the class, I'm just not the best student in the class and when I speak up, I come across as super nervous and slightly incompetent. I did the work more completely than all but one other person in the class. It made me really angry because I see my classmates who can get by with so little effort when I put hours of work into the same thing. The professor can't see that though.

But then I wonder if maybe I should really be mad at myself. I'm the one holding me back, right?

But that got me thinking...doesn't the professor have a responsibility as an educator to take notice that I'm not performing up to expectations and contact me directly about it? Maybe offer ways I can improve? Not compare me to Tarzan. Yeah, thanks, that felt awesome. In my education courses, we've been talking about the responsibility of a teacher to his or her students and recognizing that not everyone learns the same and teaching all different kinds of methods is part of that responsibility. And this professor isn't meeting that. Now, I know we're in college and it's an upper level course so there is some expectation that these things will be accomplished individually. And that's fine. But there are more effective ways of saying, "Hey, you need to work a little more at this," than making a joke.

It's just...I dunno, it's gotten to the point where I'm ready to quit the class. I don't have to take this class, and if it's really going to take me 6+ hours a week to do the work...I just don't have that kind of time. Plus add on another 2 since I need to work even still harder at this to live up to my professor's expectations. And though I absolutely love my classmates, if this professor keeps it up I'm really going to snap.

My friend and I were talking earlier about maybe dropping the class in question since it's so much work and not in either of our majors. I think I was less serious than my friend was. I'm considering it a lot more now. Apparently I have until the 27th to decide. I'd try and enroll in an online English course which would help with the education major. It'd be a pretty general class - Brit Lit or something - so I could take it almost anywhere, since I think Mizzou isn't allowing you to enroll anymore. Eh. It's just an idea. The more I think about it though, the more dropping the class makes sense.

Ice Skating

I have tried and tried to write this post, but it's just never happened. It'll sit with the drafts of posts and watch as the ones around it get picked for posting and wonder why it isn't good enough.

But that's how I feel about ice skating. It's not good enough. I wasn't good enough. I like to breeze over the fact that I ice skated because I've changed so much since then. Because I always feel like it's the one time I really let something go I was passionate about. Because I was only 9 years old when I quit.

But none of that really makes sense does it? I can't just write about it in choppy sentences and vague explanations. So I'm taking a leaf out of J's book and doing a video blog. And hopefully I will verbally explain things better than I could write them.



I'm never doing a video blog again. That took way to damn much effort.

Friends-ish?

I was talking to my family about some of the new friends I've made recently. And that got me thinking, how can I really call someone I only met a few weeks, maybe a month, ago my friend? We're friends-ish? But then what about the friends who are close but just not quite close enough to be called good friends? Friends-ish again?

I don't mean to brag (okay, I kinda do), but I'm a really solid friend. I'm not the best friend in the world, but I've got it down. If you need me, I'm there. Want to talk to someone in the middle of the night? Call me up. Need a ride? I have a car. Just want to hang? Sure, I'm free. If you want advice, I can offer it. If you just want a sympathetic ear, well, I've learned how to give that too. But it wasn't always that way.

I used to be pretty unsympathetic. I think it reflects how I expect my friends to act. When I rant to someone, I don't expect them to be all, "Oh, I'm so sorry, that really sucks for you." I expect them to relate to me. I expect them to rant back and then tell me to suck it up and get over whatever petty thing is bothering me. Then I had some pretty bad things happen to me where I just needed sympathy. And I got why people wanted me to be sympathetic.

Still, it bothers me when people won't take action to better themselves. I stand to lose two good friends because of my stance (okay, so we'll still be friends, but we just won't be very close). They both rant to me about what's wrong with their respective lives and I'm sympathetic at first. They want it to change, so I offer suggestions on how to make it change. Then I get criticized for being judgmental. They don't want to take action; they want things to just happen for them. I can't stand this! I can't be sympathetic to people who won't help themselves. I just can't. If you aren't trying to better your situation, I see absolutely no reason to help you.

So they aren't talking to me right now, and it's a little troublesome to me. I want to keep these people as my friends, but I feel like they're being immature. I'm torn between being a good friend and waiting around for them to get over it, or being mean (while also possibly being a better friend) and pushing them further.

All this got me thinking about what I want from my friends. I want them to be there for me when shit hits the fan. I want my friends to invite me to hang out or study together. I want a phone call or email or text when something reminds you of me or to remind me of some inside joke. I don't demand constant contact, but monthly would be nice. I guess what it boils down to is time. I want your time. I want you to take the time to say, hey, I'm thinking of you or hey, I need your help. Clicking the like button on Facebook has too easily become a replacement for the occasional after school email.

I'm guilty of this too, but no more. I pledge to give my friends my time. And if you can't give that in return...well, I'm guess I'm not as close to as many people as I thought. But I think I'm okay with that. I don't want a ton of fluff friends cluttering my inner circle of friends, you know? Get rid of all the friends-ish. Quality over quantity. Ugh, it almost disgusts me to talk about friendships like that. I'm just going to stop before I piss someone off so much that they don't want to be my friend anymore. XD

My 2nd Night Without Shoes

I have a bad habit of just not wearing shoes when it matters, I guess. Hopefully some of you remember my first night without shoes. This night was not quite as epic and no where near as lengthy, but still one of my favorite "How the hell did I wind up in this situation?" college stories.

My old roommate has a birthday at the end January. She threw a party one weekend. I was sober driver for one of my friends who wanted to go to a different party first. I was just dropping her off, so I didn't wear shoes when I ran the 20 feet from my apartment to my car. But then she invites me to the party. And insists on me going in. So I do. People ask me why I'm not wearing shoes and I answer that since it's a luau themed party, shoes didn't seem necessary. How convenient, huh? They buy this story and I am able to mingle and join a group.

Then the group decides to break out a hookah and smoke some apple flavored tobacco. We go outside. Keep in mind, it's January. In the Midwest. At night. It's below freezing out and there's snow on the ground from the last fall a couple of days ago. And I. Don't. Have. Shoes. Once people stop trying to get me to try some of the hookah, they offer me drinks to warm me up. A sip of a mixed drink here, a wine cooler there...before I knew it, I had a mild buzz. For the first time. Outside in late January without shoes. Awesome.

By the time I decide to go back to my house, the buzz has worn off. But not for long. See, back at the apartment the party has picked up and once people hear about how I froze my feet off, they want to warm me up. With a Smirnoff Ice. And card games. And bad sing alongs. And piling 5 people onto a 3 person couch. XD

So! Lessons learned from this. Always wear your shoes when you leave the house. No matter what. If you're cold, alcohol really does help. Hookah just doesn't taste that great. And if you are in need of alcohol, go with sympathy. Works like a charm.