Trying to turn it around

By 7:30 am, I was pretty convinced today was going to be one of “those” days. Because I’d had to completely change my outfit 2 1/2 times this morning (and should have a 3rd time, because my nylons have a run in them, but I couldn’t find an acceptable pair of pants to wear instead), I was two buses behind schedule. When I pulled onto the exit ramp from the highway that leads to the park-and-ride lot, I found I couldn’t make a right turn, again without any sort of signage for the detour. After I did my U-turn, they had the street narrowed down to 1 lane, from 4. It was slow-going for that block and a half. And as I sat at the light waiting to make my left turn, instead of the light changing to green when it should have, it switched to a flashing red light. This particular intersection has 3-4 lanes in each direction, (7 north-south, 6 east-west, give or take a lane), so that was a mess. And then the bus driver took off suddenly as I was trying to sit down (while wearing heels and a pencil skirt), causing me to bang my elbow quite hard into the window frame. (Sidenote: I really didn’t want to wear these heels for a second day in a row, and now my feet hurt. They’re great for one day, but I really should have worn flats, but that would have looked ridiculous with this skirt.)

I wasn’t actually surprised when I had a headache at 9. (It seems to have gone away mostly on its own, thank goodness.)

Yesterday afternoon, we had an unscheduled meeting at work announcing some major changes in management – none that should affect me, but it still had people edgy all day.

And, just because I’m putting it all out there, let me (finally) explain the drama in my education program.

To back-track, I started taking classes first at St Paul College in 2006, and had no problems with them whatsoever. The next year I started at Metro, taking the third week of classes off to get married. I applied to the program, but it took me a while to get all of the application requirements (namely the 40 hours and letters of recommendation). In the meantime, I was able to take the intro courses, and get my social studies classes completed. Since I wasn’t admitted to the program, I didn’t have an advisor, and being a post-baccalaureate student didn’t help things any (there are fewer of us, and we seem to fall through the cracks a lot). I did, however, have a social studies advisor, who is a wonderful man. During my last year of social studies classes, he went on sabbatical, and my temporary advisor didn’t have a clue – things got messy when I needed to approval to take a class at a local community college to meet a requirement. Thankfully, he came back from sabbatical in time to teach the capstone course. At some point, I was made aware that I should have met with the post-bac advisor. When I finally did meet him and he learned I’d been “in the program” (kind of) for two years, he accusingly asked me why I hadn’t met with him before. I told him that no one had informed me I should, and after doing the math, we figured out that I applied just before he came to work with the program, and I was one of the students who fell between the cracks in the transition.

For the most part, things have gone fine since then, although I continue to have registration difficulties and they still haven’t figured out where all of my application materials are. However, the state made some changes to the licensure process that ensured the waters were not calm. The big change was that Minnesota no longer uses the Praxis series to test basic skills, content knowledge, or pedagogy. Minnesota decided it was better than that, and needed to come up with its own tests. The MTLE became effective last fall, and I was one of the first groups to take the basic skills test (they offer the tests once a month, and I took them in the fourth or fifth month they were doing it) – I waited a bit for them to work some kinks out, namely that no “passing scores” had been determined yet. As I reported at the time, in the end it wasn’t a big deal, and I passed with flying colors. It was, however, frustrating and unnerving that there were almost no test prep materials available, and I spent a lot of class time after taking the tests telling my classmates about the tests, to alleviate their fears.

Fast-forward to this August, when I met with my post-bac advisor to go over student teaching stuff. I was told to work on my goals, send him a draft, and he’d help me polish it up. He made no mention of the resume, application letter, or September 1 deadline. Arguably, I should have paid more attention to the details myself, so I can’t put that all on him.

Forward another 3 weeks to last Friday night, when I went to my practicum class. (Are you still paying attention and following all of this craziness?) Several things were announced during that class that just made me think that … I really should have found a way to complete the program before now, because it just keeps getting more complicated.

My post-bac advisor is, suddenly, on medical leave for at least a month, if not the rest of the semester. There was some sort of tragedy. This means I have another temporary advisor.
The September 1 deadline was stressed (it was September 9th), but it seems it’s not a hard and fast deadline. Just… get your paperwork in soon. Stressful and yet not.
There’s yet another change to the licensure requirements. Now we have to submit a series of videos that will be reviewed (anonymously) before we can get our licenses. Because we’re the first group to go through this (there was a test group last year and it sounds like things were crazy messy for them, and I’m glad we weren’t the pilot group), there’s a lot of unknowns. Will this cost anything? Well, it won’t cost us anything, because the program decided to purchase the necessary memberships to a website that we’ll need to use, but no one knows what the future holds. It’s an unfunded mandate (love those).

Here’s the last bit of craziness. Back in my technology class (which was terrible), we were forced to use a certain website to create electronic portfolios that we were told were required for the licensure process. The website that we were given memberships to for the video thing also has an electronic portfolio component, and now we can choose to use that one if we so desire, instead of the other, incredibly crappy one. Needless to say, I spent some time earlier this week moving content from the crappy site to this new, easier to use, aesthetically-pleasing site.

Oh, I also learned that the requirements for this second practicum are drastically different from the first one, and so basically now I have to do my student teaching at a high school instead of a middle school, lest I want to do a whole lot of extra work (all because I couldn’t find a middle school placement last spring and chose to be grateful for the high school placement someone found me). This means I need to write my application letter and pretend that I really want to teach high school – that should be interesting.

On top of this, back at work, my program recently received a promotion of sorts. We are no longer a program within a division (within a department of state government), we are now a division unto ourselves. This has meant more for management, but it has affected some of our website stuff, and suddenly yesterday I was dealing with needed to do a mini redesign of our internal website (which will again need to be modified later today to reflect certain staffing changes that were alluded to earlier). Oh, but don’t do too much, because the department has decided to do a redesign of the entire internal website, and I’ve been invited to be on the committee, but we won’t be meeting until the end of the month, and “soon” probably means “implement a whole new thing right in the middle of my leave of absence for student teaching.” But we won’t know anything until the end of the month.

So, when I say I’m having a day, I really mean it.

That said, I really am trying to turn it around. I’d like to post some “Thankful Thoughts” by the end of the day, but I’m having difficulty finding the positive (with all the negatives floating around). I’m hoping that spilling all now will get some of it out of my system, and I’ll be able to move forward with a better attitude. Truly, I’m trying. To that end, I plan on getting a real lunch today (didn’t have time to make one this morning), going to the farmer’s market, and spending some time sewing when I get home while goes to his fitness class. And then I’ll paint my nails (red and blue, because we’re going to a Twins game tomorrow).

Now, if you actually got to the end of this incredibly long post and understood most of what I said, 1 million bonus points for you, and a gold star to boot!