The Chronicles Of Nay

Happy Thursday! I hope that everyone is having a good week! My week is going so slow! How is it only Thursday!? Luckily my students haven’t been too crazy yet. I man next week might get a little crazier but as of right now, not so bad! We are all counting down the days to Christmas break that is for sure!

For those of you that have only known me as an adult, I was a HORRIBLE student in school. I did the bare minimum to get by and sometimes if I could do less I would. I was for sure one of the kinda of people that didn’t understand how high school was important to my life. School didn’t come easy for me; I see some of the same issues in some of my students. School came much easier for my brother. I noticed! haha I would get so frustrated he didn’t have to work nearly as hard as I did to make the same grades or better grades. My parents never once told me, acted like or tried to make feel like my brother was smarter than me.

School was a big deal to my parents. I mean looking back I get it! haha When I was a kid neither of my parents had gone beyond high school. In my house we talked about the transition of going to college after high school as if it were like the transition of going to high school after middle school. It was just something we were going to do. I remember from a very young age my dad would say “you are going to get a college degree, but I will let you pick what it is in!”

I got in trouble a lot for my grades and talkative behavior at school. I mean looking back it was 100% ADHD; at the time I was just too talkative to get my work done or too unorganized to turn things in! When grades would come out, I often found myself doing manual labor as punishment. I was either helping pour a sidewalk in the back yard, lay sod, redo flower beds, dig a ditch. I think that sometimes my dad just made us dig to prove his point! That evening at dinner when we were tired and sore my dad would give us the talk. The one about how important school was, how an education was our ticket to better things, and “remember people will try to take a lot of things away from you but they will never be able to take your education!” He would say that since he didn’t go to college manual labor was all he could do. He had to work outside year-round because that is all he could do. If we went to college we could work in the air conditioning. We get to work in climate control with a college degree! When my air conditioner doesn’t work in my classroom I like to through this line at people “I have a college degree I should be able to work in the air conditioning!” they are confused but it makes me chuckle! haha

Since neither of my parents went to college there was a lot of things we didn’t know that we didn’t know. I can’t tell you the number of times in my first year of college that I said “Whoa! you can major in that!??”” haha There were things I didn’t know; I didn’t know anything about cords or honors at graduation and I didn’t know anything about Greek life or clubs or that kind of stuff. We sort of just figured it out as we went! haha

All that to say, whoa grad school is an entirely different ball game! I still don’t know what I am doing! I started the PhD program in August. During my master’s most of my classes were with PhD students also. The professors just have a part of the syllabus that has slightly different assignments or different page requirements for assignments. When I started the program, I had a false sense of like “hey I have been doing this! I got this!” Don’t get me wrong, the class load has been pretty much the same. I had to write a 20-page paper as a PhD student instead of a 10-page paper but in the end she was like “to me content is more important so don’t ramble on for 5 more pages just to make the page number count!” say less! Like I said I was prepared for the workload. I finished the semester with another 4.0. What I was not prepared for was, again, that I don’t know what I don’t know stuff! I am a first-generation graduate student going through this process and I have no idea what the heck I am doing hopefully I am faking it well! haha

I will say that I am trying hard to make friends in the program so that we can lean on each other. Someone once told me that introverts don’t make friends extroverts just adopt them. I looked around and was like up… all my little introvert friends! haha We are going through this together it is nice and helpful. Most people that are further along are willing and happy to be helpful with the knowledge that they have gained so far. However, some people are NOT! I don’t know if it is because they had to figure something out that they feel that they don’t want to help others, or they feel that since they know what is going on they don’t want to help. I don’t know. All I can do is remember how those people respond to questions and make sure I am not in a place where I have to ask them questions anymore! haha

Sometimes I get this overwhelming feeling that I need to cry, especially when I talk to some of the people farther along in the program. I mean I know that they were where I am once, but I can’t imagine being that knowledgeable about something in the next four years! It is so intimidating! It is also just a very strange feeling to think that I am working at becoming an “expert” in something. Just a lot of emotions and feelings.

Well Enough of that for now! I am going to work on getting some grades done so that I can work on getting some of these district quarterly short answers graded! It is so frustrating, the district over here giving us more to do! they make these tests with short answer then they are like hey you guys grade them. and have them graded by end of day! I swear! I hope that everyone makes it through the week!!