Update: School, Life, and General Busyness

I feel as though I should update a bit for those of you who aren't in direct contact with me.
Life has been crazy since my last update well over a month ago. I will start by saying that I hate moving. It is such a difficult process, even when you don't have to move all your possession, and had to do it twice in two weeks.

So I'm back at school now, four and a half weeks in and while I'm finally settling into a routine there are still parts of my life that have no routine, like how much "busy work" I'm going to have in a given week (I'll get to this later), or how many athletic events I have to work during a week, or how many other things I have to do during each week! You see, I have a serious problem with telling people no, so I am involved in entirely too many activities. Not only am I a student taking the maximum of 16.5 credit hours plus observations, I am also partly in charge of our athletic event staff, a student ambassador, a member of Student Alumni Association, an athlete (albeit a spring one), on a couple of important committees, a Chapel planner, a Student Chaplain which includes "office hours," a worship project of sorts, and at least two meetings a week, and probably more things that I can't think of at the moment.

Now I am very busy and I kind of like to complain about it, but I know that other people are just as busy as I am if not busier, which leads to a little venting. I hate it when people act like they are the only ones who have work to do. They are the only one's who's activities matter, so they can't help with commitments they have made at the expense of others involved. I can't really be much more specific than that but it has been the subject of several rants to friends. I hate it when people flake out!

I'm done with that so it's on to classes. While I am taking 16.5 hours I didn't think that this semester would be as work intensive as it is, I mean, ed courses don't have that much work, do they? Ha, I was incredibly wrong about that. This is the first week I haven't been so swamped with observations, reflections, lesson plans, and other random work that I have had time to breathe. I am enjoying all of my classes, even the ones that assign busy work, and especially the ones that enable me to spend extended time observing/helping out in a classroom. It makes all the class work worth it just to help one student spell a word, or read a book. But there is the busy work. I, along with my classmates, have decided that our professors need to communicate better. In two of my classes we are taught that effective teachers don't assign busy work, among other things, but one of my classes has large amounts of busy work. I spent several hours last week working on coloring 8 physical maps to show elevation. Now you are probably saying to yourself, "That can't be so bad. It's only coloring," which under some circumstances would be a correct assumption, but coloring these maps was one of the worst assignments I have ever had to complete. It was pointless!! Why do college students studying to be teachers need to know how to color maps? Am I, in my professional life as a teacher, ever going to color a map? NO!!!!!! Also last week in this same class we had to do presentations on a continent. We were given two guidelines, 1) it had to be 20 minutes long, and 2) we had to cover the four areas assessed in the KS state social science standards Economics, Civics/Government, Geography, and History. After the fact we were informed that our grade would be divided into 60% for information, 10% for presentation, 10% for visual aids, and 20% for something I don't remember. My visual aid was a map of North America that I drew on the chalkboard, very rough. Needless to say this information would have been good to have before the presentation. Oh well, I'm not too worried about it, after all, all I hear these days is how much we need male elementary school teachers ;) at least that's what my classmates think I should think.

So that is a significant part of my life. I'll bring the rest up to speed sometime soon, hopefully before the chaos of Fall Fest begins on Saturday.

Peace,
Daniel