Awww....

I have been having a not very good week.

This is the second week of the summer school course I'm taking - I get to go home tomorrow!!!! and although I really enjoyed last week, this week, not so much.

Been really cranky, and having a LOT of very negative thoughts about whether I am really up for 2+ more years of Trent. I likes my house. I like Georgian ...I COULD just finish my MA and apply to go back and teach at the college level and....

well, yeah... be bored out of my skull within a few years and all ...but...

ANYWAY... today the secretary was in and not busy and I happened to think of my student evaluations .... almost didn't even ask for them because I was in SUCH a pissy mood... but I did it anyway and guess what????

They like me... they really like me LOL

Lots of really positive feedback from my students - comments about the variety of activities I offered and the effort I put into "helping us to better understand the literature" and they appreciated my use of technology and how quickly I responded to emails and so on.

s'almost enough to make me think I should keep going.

Read more...

A Very Busy Week

Am in the winding down phase of Congress 2009 now... have attended sessions of the 2 associations that I was most interested in. There are some others here and I might, if I get motivated, check out some other sessions and see what is happening in them....

Or I might just hang out in the Career Corner workshops today...really have not decided yet.

Tomorrow I'll be heading to Brampton, and Friday, meeting with some people re: my research project - hmmm...still haven't done anything about a digital recorder...that would be good to have. It is raining though, and I don't, at this point, feel terribly motivated to go wandering into the city again. The only Staples I remember seeing was near the Home Depot hubby & I stopped at on our way into Ottawa - but I have no idea where that is in relation to where I am now. I'm sure my sister won't mind stopping at a Staples somewhere... or dropping me near one on Friday...will have time to deal with it during the day while she's working and I'm just killing time before my meeting.

Am very glad I thought to bring my umbrella. It is not only functional, but also beautiful .....dark green with hummingbirds and flowers. It was a gift from my mother, and it makes me smile every time it rains as I welcome the opportunity to use it.

Hmm...guess I am not going to a 9 am session :)

I'd best get off my butt and head over to the university centre or I'll end up missing things there too.

Read more...

Staying in Residence

Well, here I am in residence at Carleton University in Ottawa.

I can not IMAGINE actually living in one of these units for a whole school year... the room I'm in is meant for two people -- I've got it to myself though, thank goodness. Two very uncomfortable beds, 2 desks, 1 closet with 2 standing open shelves in it - room for maybe at MOST 10 hangers between the shelves.

There are 4 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms off of a main sitting room ...no kitchen facilities at all.

No privacy and OMG it's loud. The lock on the main door to the suite is loud, and every time it is opened or closed it demands attention. The toilets' flush is short lived but VERY loud ...and you can hear pretty much everything that is said in every room anywhere near yours - both within the suite and through the walls from others.

I cannot IMAGINE having 8 people in this one unit - maybe some of the other rooms are actual singles? Haven't met any of my suite-mates yet, or seen any of the other rooms...but yikes!

Another plus to being a nontraditional student - we rarely find ourselves living in residence!

Read more...

Online courses

philly5113 asked: I might try an internet course, they cost less. Any thoughts on this?

I've taken online courses from two universities.

Taking them through my own undergrad university was easiest - their courses automatically counted towards my degree without any hoop-jumping at all, which was nice. They also came with deadlines and due dates - so it was significantly easier for me to manage my time and get things done over the course of the semester rather than working in fits and starts and then having a big rush to finish at the end of the six months time allowance I was given from the other university.

Taking courses through a different university, Athabasca U, involved a whole lot of hoop-jumping to make sure that credits would apply towards my degree. I had to get a Letter of Permission, which turned into a process that lasted WAY too long. That was in no way Athabasca's fault, though - it was the people I was dealing with at my end that were a pain in the posterior.

Athabasca U gives you up to six months to complete everything required for each course - no due dates, and no one cares if you actually get it done or not. So completing those required quite a bit more self discipline - and in one case, when I had a car accident during the week my final exam was booked, an extension (more hoop-jumping).

The one thing that ALL of the Internet based courses I have taken have shared is that although I was assigned a prof/tutor, there was next to no interaction with them. When I emailed with a specific question, the turnaround time was BRUTAL .... in far too many cases, it was in excess of two weeks. The turnaround time for marking was also far slower than I find tolerable - I absolutely and positively DETEST it when I don't have assignment #1 back until after #2 or #3 are back. It may be though, that I just wasn't lucky - surely not all online profs are that slow? I hope?!

When I teach online courses (Ha!) I will be very sure to email each student early in the course, and follow up with a how's it going partway through. And, of course, I will answer their emails and get their work back to them within a reasonable period of time.

I suspect that courses that have an interactive online component would suit me better.

I don't regret having taken any of the courses I did - nor the money I spent - but there are a lot of things that could have been done much, much better.

Have you taken (or taught) any online courses? How did they work for you? Philly and I would love to know.

Read more...

Advantages of being a nontraditional student

I said in yesterday's post, Being a nontraditional student sucks? that I would post some of what I see as advantages of being a nontraditional student. So - here is a list:

1. As a nontraditional student, we tend to have a lot more life experience on which to draw. We have usually read more, had more experience dealing with businesses and with people, and have work experience that can go a long way to helping us to be able to apply what we are learning to what we already know. Assimulation is always easier than accomodation - and so we nontraditional students get to learn the easier way a lot more.
2. Nontraditional students are generally more disciplined (we have to be!) and professors like us because of it.
3. Nontraditional students are also usually closer in age to the professors, which can make for better relationships with them - especially important when it comes to reference letters and recommendations for scholarships.
   
4. Being able to better understand how our professors think makes it far easier to pick up on important clues about what they are looking for in essays and exams.
   
5. Nontraditional students understand the importance of the investment we are making in our education, and are more likely to take it seriously - again, a tendency that in my experience is often highly valued in an academic environment.
6. Nontraditional students are better at juggling than other students are - so we are typically less inclined to go into total meltdown at the midterm and end of every semester... not that we don't - but we usually manage to get through those stressful periods better than some.
   
7. Nontraditional students have connections that can help to support us while we are in school and also help us to get jobs when we are done.

Like my tag line says ....Nontraditional, mature, returning students ....no matter what you call us, we are a determined and resourceful bunch.

Read more...

Being a nontraditional student sucks?

That made me kind of sad - the fact that one of the search terms that showed up in my google analytics today was that being a nontraditional student sucks.

That has not been my experience at all - I think that being a nontraditional student can certainly be challenging - we nontrads tend to have a lot more juggling to do to make it all work. But we also have advantages that can make our experiences as nontraditional students pay off.

When I accomplish something as a nontraditional student, I take pride in the fact that I pulled it off in spite of all of the challenges I face. It means more, I think, to succeed when it's hard.

My degrees show that I can not just write papers and pass exams ... but also that I can juggle, organize, balance, and overcome.

Especially overcome. Being a nontraditional student can be really difficult. I've done it as a broke, burned out single mom; as a caregiver for someone with Alzheimers who needed a great deal of care and attention and who died here, in my living room, in the middle of a semester in which I was carrying a full load as a student and a full teaching load; and now, dealing with some pretty inconvenient health problems of my own.

When I walk across the stage and pick up my degrees, that means something. Of course, it means something for every student that makes it that far - but for me, it is a particular source of pride.

I'm not feeling so hot tonight so I'm off to bed - tomorrow I will write about what I see as advantages of being a nontraditional student.

But in the meantime, let me just say that I don't think that being a nontraditional student has to suck - and if you are someone that ended up here by searching "being a nontraditional student sucks" I hope you'll drop a comment - or send me an email - and maybe together we can find some solutions to make it work better for you. I would love to help ... that is exactly why I started this blog.

Read more...

Textbooks

What do you do with your no-longer-needed textbooks?

Me, I tend to keep them ... although I did clear some out today while I was reorganizing bookshelves... just not any from my university studies - it was some old and now pretty much obsolete computer texts that I finally managed to part with. From back when I did my diploma in Computer Programming.

My English texts are mostly keepers - at least for now... although I do seem to have multiple copies of some, so I could presumably thin those out a bit, I suppose. If it wasn't so gosh-darned expensive to mail books to the US I'd have a contest, maybe!

At least in English, they don't become obsolete! When I think of how much I paid for some of those computer texts... yikes!

Read more...

They said it couldn't be done...

.... well, actually, 'twas I that said it couldn't be done.

Repeatedly ... everyone else kept saying that of course I would pull it off - I always do. Once again, they were right, and I was wrong.

I managed to get my last 20+ page essay submitted today.

Yay me!

That makes 3 big one and 3 little ones all doing in a very short period of time. The one I finished today, I am quite happy with, even .. the other two need more work but I ran out of time...

Anyway ... they are done. My proposal for the program is sent off to my advisor for review; all of the rest have been submitted.

Tomorrow I will revise my ethics application and fire that off, and get the rest of my first years' exams marked and their final marks calculated and sent off.

And then all I will have left is to write my major research paper. 50 pages, but I have 6 weeks to do it in.

After pulling off almost 100 pages of essays and so on in the last 2 weeks, I think I can manage that - especially since all of the papers I have done relate to the major research paper, so a lot of the research for it is already done.

Yay me.

I might just make it through this MA thing after all :)

Read more...

Flitting off

So ...today is the day for my first year ENGL students' final exam. Hubby took the day off and we're driving down to be there when they finish so that I can grab my sections' exams - they all need to be marked and their final marks submitted by Monday.

I'm hoping to get most of that done in the car on the way home, actually... exams don't get handed back, so I don't need to do all the commenting and so on that I do when I mark essays (not that many of them seem to read the comments but I try).

Just remembered that I never did open the file that contained the exam! I guess I'll find out what was on it when I get them. The profs set the exam and although we get a copy, I don't like to have it potentially influence the final exam review I do with my guys, so I don't open it before that - meant to go and have a look after, but ....

Oh well. No big deal.

Still working on the last of my semester papers, about Robert J Sawyer's Wake and viral contagion in Canadian publishing. It's all coming together very well, but still time consuming. Hoping to have it handed in by noon tomorrow. The incomplete option has been offered and I was tempted but it would be SO nice to have everything done ....well everything aside from my major research paper, anyway. So ...will just have to stay up tonight until it's done, get up in the morning and proofread, and fire it off. Sounds like a plan, don't it?

Once that's done, will be back to blogging regularly.

Read more...

Nontraditional Students & Crisis of Confidence

Do you do it too?

I don't know if it's because I'm a nontraditional student or just because I am a total neurotic - but I hate, hate, HATE, handing in my essays any more.

I was up until 6:30 this morning finishing my CanLit one - at about 5:30 I started thinking

"OMG this is crap; I can't hand this in. I am going to fail! What if I fail? My last essay was crap too. Oh God, I'm going to fail!"

Got myself totally freaked out and even though I eventually did hit send on the damn email and go to bed for a few hours sleep, the pit of anxiety in my gut just will not go away.

I'm working, now, on my proposal re: my Major Research Paper. Everything I have done this year has been leading up to this paper. I have had the opportunity to talk to my advisor, other profs, get (and incorporate) feedback from them, fellow students, etc. I have read hundreds of academic articles. I have written essays related to smaller sections of the whole.

I know what I'm doing and how I am going to do it - and I can't seem to write a blessed thing.

Well, I can ... but then I just can't seem to keep my hand from hitting the Delete key.

Crap, crap, it's all crap!

I don't have time to be neurotic this week. I need to get this proposal sent off to my advisor so that she has time to review it before it has to be submitted to the department.

And then I still have another major paper (20+ pages) to write, and 20 essays to mark - although I think rather than torture myself with a block of 20, I'm going to start doing them a few at a time - would be nice to at least start seeing that number go down.

And maybe at least in comparison to those, my own work won't seem like such crap any more?

So.... what do you think? Is this a nontraditional student thing? Or am I just neurotic?

Read more...

Nontraditional Student Chooses Blog Over Homework

Yup... bad, bad, nontraditional student!

Got three small papers to finish up this week, and a 20 pager due next Tuesday and what have I been doing all evening?

Mucking around with images and ~stuff~ in this template, and changing my Entrecard image and link to come this-a-way instead of going that-a-way. I'm sure I've lost my place at the top of the Education blogs on Entrecard during this whole kerfuffle with Today.com, upon which I shall not comment (right now, anyway) - but what goes down can just as easily go back up, n'est-ce pas?

Feel free to correct my French, by the way ... one of the scariest things about doing the Phd thing is that I have to master enough French to pass a test. It has been a VERY long time since I used my French! Might see if I can fit in an undergrad course or two.

Anyway ... it's snowing here on beautiful Georgian Bay... which might seriously mess up my week! I have the end of semester big presentation thing in Peterborough tomorrow - it's a 2.5 hour drive when it isn't snowing like the middle of winter! Hoping that it will settle down by morning! But the weather guy doesn't seem to want to co-operate!

But like I've observed before, there are always challenges to the nontraditional student thing.

Read more...