When the Dog Bites, When the Bee Stings

Things That Are Keeping Me Sane During Finals:

The Vince Guaraldi Trio Charlie Brown Christmas Album

Aria Women's Protein Shakes

Five Minute Facebook Stalking Breaks

Grilled Cheese and Tomato Soup

Inventing the Twitter Hashtag #gradschoolproblems

Red Starbucks Cups

Comfy Pants

GChat

The amazing battery life on my MacBook

My FB picture being Tanya from Fievel Goes West

Talking about other people in the library in ASL

Instant Netflix at the end of a very long day

Apologies for not sourcing my images. No time! What's keeping YOU sane in this busy time of year?

Whatever I Feel Like I Wanna Do, Gosh!

Sorry I've been such a bad little blogger lately. It's mostly because I've actually been exploring. It's also partially because of this:

Yep. I redo this baby at least every other day.
You should see it now. It's color coded and beautiful.

BUT on the I've-Actually-Been-Leaving-My-Room front, here's a short rundown of what I've been doing for the last week or so:

- I started my job. So far, so good. It's pretty straightforward and easy. It might get boring, but I'm happy to be working from home... at least I can play good music!

- I met the 2nd year students in my program. There are 8 of them (there are 3 of us), and they all seem really great. Two of them already have jobs, which they're using for their student teaching. Myself and the other two first years kinda see that as living the dream.

- I've been bonding with the people in my program, whom we'll refer to as Miss M and Mister M, no relation. We went out to dinner on Tuesday night, and I really think we got to know each other quite well. We haven't aired all of our baggage or anything yet, but we really do love each other already. It's nice that all of us jumped in and felt the same way: We're going to be a close-knit group. Let's skip the awkward phase and just be best friends.

- I've been taking pictures with my iPhone. Not of people though. Still working on that part.

This is the courtyard between my dorm and my school building.
Seriously, sometimes I feel like I go to Hogwarts. And this isn't even the pretty part.

- I went out with Roomie S's college friends, which was super fun. I got to explore Midtown East, which is a totally new area for me. Sure, there's some touristy stuff around there that I've seen, but the NYC bar scene is a whole new world for me.

- I watched the Gator game at one of the local Gotham Gators bars with my good friend and fellow Gator-transplant Jungle K. It was much more low-key than the Atlanta Gator bar I went to with my sister. But it was nice to see an old friend, make some new ones, and be served by a funny bartender. Overall, a good experience.

- I also got to explore Greenwich Village a little, since the Gator bar was downtown. Not too much to report except that I'm growing less afraid of it. And Washington Square Park is the best place in the world for people watching.

Today it was also a wonderful place for clear blue sky watching

Nothing too crazy, but it's been a good week. Too much time spent in bars for my liking, but I guess that's the standard "get to know the people around you" place for 20somethings. Oh well, at least we're getting pretty good at finding cheap drinks!

Hooray for School! Part II

Why yes, I am only taking four classes and still taking two full posts to write about them. Thanks for asking. Here's the rest of them!

Language Development & Habituation: The Foundations
My first linguistics class! I'm still unsure how I feel about this one, other than that I'm excited to learn more about the subject. We don't focus on ASL linguistics or teaching language to any special populations, but the class is a foundation for those classes which we will take later. We also share this class with the Deaf Ed program.

Cognition & Learning
I'm taking this psychology class online. Unlike UF's online courses, there is no taped lecture for me to watch or optional class for me to attend. It's basically a distance learning course, so most of the people in my class don't even live in NYC. What on earth do you do in a class that doesn't have a lecture? You read. A lot. You read textbooks, articles, and lecture notes. It seems ridiculous to pay the amount I pay in tuition to just read a book and not actually have someone lecturing, which is why the other people in my program have chosen to take the in-person option for this class, which meets on Monday nights.

So why on earth have I chosen to pay full tuition to read lecture notes instead of just taking the class like a normal human being? First, some background info: TC's classes started on a Wednesday, so no Monday or Tuesday classes. These missed dates are made up for during Thanksgiving, when Wed/Thurs/Fri classes are all canceled. HOWEVER, the second week of classes was Labor Day, so STILL no Monday classes. That's right, Monday classes will not meet for the first time until the third week of school. So how is TC making up for this? Fall semester ends on Monday, Dec 20th. Since I have yet to meet a single person with Friday classes, classes for most other people end on Thursday, Dec 16th. That's a whole four days earlier, folks.

Yep. That's my reason. It is not a good one. But traditionally, the weekend before Christmas is very important to my family. We lost my cousin to Hodgkin's Lymphoma on December 19th, 2005. Since then, we have spent the days surrounding Dec 19th celebrating his life and legacy, which is the love that our family shares. I don't know about you, but I don't want to spend the five year anniversary of his passing writing a final paper. Online class it is.

Hooray for School! Part I

There are a few reasons I haven't talked about my classes yet. First, I had yet to have all of my classes. Well, we're a week in, so that one is taken care of.

Second, I wasn't sure how personal I wanted this blog to be. It was originally just going to be about New York City in general, no thoughts or anecdotes about my education at all. Recently I've decided that I'd rather use it to keep up with everyone that's far away than try to be Carrie Bradshaw and create a publishable character (a girl can dream). I don't want to feel like I can't say something on here because it doesn't fit with the "theme" of my blog. So basically, screw it, I'm going to write about school. I didn't move to New York to be a writer. I moved to New York to be a student, and eventually a teacher. School is my life. My life is school.

SO without further ado, thoughts after my first week of classes:

Designing Curriculum & Instruction
The first thing I learned in this class is that my professor is a Gator, so that was pretty awesome. Apart from that, this class freekin terrifies me. There's an unwritten prerequisite (Principles of Teaching & Learning), which is also on my program's course of study. Unfortunately, that class wasn't offered this semester, so we plunged head first into this class. Almost everyone else in the class is a second year student and/or has teaching experience. I'm bound and determined to do my damnedest in this class, but that 200-page curriculum project at the end of the semester is pretty daunting. Luckily the other people in my program are all in my section, so we should be able to form a group and create an actual ASL curriculum, which will basically be the coolest thing in the world, assuming we decode the language of our crazy textbooks and actually figure out how this curriculum design stuff works.

Intellectual History of the Deaf
This class is listed on my course of study as "Psychosocial Aspects of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, Part I." Needless to say, I was overjoyed when I showed up and SURPRISE it's a history class. If you haven't noticed already, I'm a total history geek. I really liked learning Deaf culture in sign language classes because I enjoyed the historical aspect of it. On our first day, we learned about references to deaf people in the Torah and Talmud, so I was basically overjoyed. Let's just combine everything I love learning about into one class. I actually liked doing the reading for this class today. I'm sure my fellow teaching assistants down in the Swamp can understand how excited I was to read about Clerc, Gallaudet, Stoeke, Public Law 94-142 and the IDEA (bonus points if you all just did the signs for those things/heard Tuccelli in your head while reading this).

We're combined with the Deaf Education students for this class, and not everyone understands ASL. My program coordinator, who is Deaf, teaches the class entirely in sign, so we have a pair of voice interpreters. They are amazingly talented interpreters, and it was cool for me to actually see a pair working together, taking turns and feeding each other things that the one currently voicing might have missed. The professor's fingerspelling is INSANELY fast, and it's usually crazy words like "epistemes," so the fact that they were catching everything is pretty darn cool.

However, as my friend Gator B over at The Boston Buzz pointed out, hearing a voice interpreter say something when you're trying to focus on the signs that you've already seen and could probably comprehend is REALLY DIFFICULT. For me, it's easy to fall back into depending on my ears to receive the information instead of my eyes, which is really bad since it's my receptive signing skills that need the most work. Unlike Gator B's ASL class, the voice interpreter will NOT be going away since some people in the Deaf Ed program here don't know a single sign. I'm seriously considering ear plugs for tomorrow's class.

Lots of words and no pictures? Sounds like a two-part post to me.