takin' it to the next level

Perhaps it was a subliminal message on the part of my apparel that caused my intro to grad paper to magically appear in the mail today. You see, our instructions for today's inservice were to "wear comfortable clothes," which meant that this morning as I tried to put together an outfit of some sort (a difficult task in my early morning stupor), I ended up wearing a black VanderCook t-shirt and a pink iit hoodie. Now, for the record, "wear comfortable clothes" is a rather dubious instruction for an inservice day, one that creates a certain amount of fear and trepidation in the hearts of all teaching staff. Well, perhaps not so much fear and trepidation as eye rolling. Why? Because more often than not it means we are about to engage in team-building exercises. Oh, that's right. You know what I'm talking about - all those crazy group activities that are supposed to be bonding experiences, yadda yadda yadda. They are all well and good, but right now most of us are experiencing an intense desire to get things done in our classrooms, and so spending half an hour sitting on our coworkers laps in a rousing round of "group sit" doesn't rank real high on the list of fun things to do. Hence the eye rolling.

However, today's group activities turned out to be a lot of fun. Darn it all. So much for my plan to be a grouch about it.

Anyway, when I got home just a few minutes ago, I found a long-anticipated piece of mail waiting for me: my intro to grad paper. For those of you keeping score at home, this would be what was heretofore referred to as the CURRICULUM PROJECT OF DOOM. In truth, the paper is merely the prelude to the DOOM, as there is much more to come during this school year. The goal is to have a completed product ready to turn in to the readers when the next summer term begins. Oy. But the first step on the way to that goal is the paper from this summer, which our prof gave a quick "once over" to tabulate our grade for the course but then spent time in the following weeks reading more carefully to give detailed feedback.

So now I have the paper back and, long story short, apparently I have succeeded in taking my quest to not suck to the graduate level. Woot. And now the real work begins....

Yikes.