Grad School: The Sequel - Day One Verdict
Tuesday, September 15, 2009 at 10:17AM 7 Quick Tuesday Takes on my first day of "Grad School: The Sequel"
1. I LOVE love love being in NYC. I love driving there, walking there, breathing there, everything. Love it.
2. My first class is about curriculum and unit design. It's going to be a bit dry and it's definitely geared toward high school teachers; however, I've never had any instruction in how to sculpt a lesson plan or semester plan, so I think it will be useful for me. I'm just going to have to constantly think about how this works for a college classroom.
3. My second class is SO awesome! It's about how to use pop culture in the classroom, something I've already done graduate work on AND tried when I was teaching at Rutgers. The professor is amazing! Confession: I've been following him on Twitter over the summer and have even watched him on Fox News. I thought I'd be super intimidated, but he's so relatable and funny. I wish I could take that class every day.
4. That professor is three years younger than me (if his Wikipedia page is correct). That's a first for me - I've never had a teacher younger than me before. It's kind of odd to think about and totally makes me feel like I haven't accomplished squat in comparison, so I try not to think about it. (Oh, and he's also my advisor so I better get over that immediately.)
5. I am way out of shape. Just walking around campus yesterday, I was sweating up a storm. Sure, it was over 80 degrees and I was carrying a bag and a sweater, but still. I used to be in better shape, even when I was heavier, just from commuting into NYC every day and doing a small amount of walking. I felt good walking around yesterday so I'm looking forward to doing more walking and having it get easier every week.
6. I'm a bit confused about the workload . . . by which I mean to say that it's really light. Surprisingly light. Both classes combined equal the workload of one grad course in my M.A. program. I'm not complaining, just . . . surprised and wondering if I can handle taking more than two classes at a time in the future (depending on my teaching load). I see now why three classes was a full load in my M.A. program but here a full load is four or five classes.
7. Mondays are going to be long days - great days, but long. Work at 8am, leave at 3pm, go into the city, class at 5 and 7, done by 9, home by 10. At that point, I probably have about one hour of coherence left and then I'm out for the count. Note to self: don't plan to accomplish things at home on Monday nights.
7 Quick Tuesday, grad school, nyc, things that make me happy in Grad School, life 
Reader Comments (4)
It sounds like you had an great day! My husband is a prof in a grad program and at 32 he is sometimes younger than his students (he had a student a few years ago who was 10+ years older than him.) I think he is okay with that, but sometimes has difficulty with students who are his own age.
I've had students at the community college who are easily 20 yrs older than me, and I never thought anything of it (and I hope they didn't either), but until you said that, I hadn't even thought about that in comparison to me now being older than my prof. Good perspective. :)
I hear about you the workload. My grad. classes in education have NOTHING on the workload at RU-C. BUT, they do have a tendency to slam on BIG projects, which can easily take 30+ hours to complete. So while RU-C stuff was steadily heavy, I've found my experience in education to be really light with a HUGE project. Don't know if that is universal, but I'm sure it'll get tougher.
I'm glad you are having such a great time and I'm SO jealous of your pop culture in the classroom course. Last night I taught p.o.v. using Beyonce ("YOU should have put a ring on it," and "If *I* were a boy"), and denotation and connotation with TLC's "No Scrubs." Good deal.
The curriculum class has some significant unit planning involved, but nothing too scary (although 30 hours per project could be right). The pop culture class culminates in an 8-10 page paper. 8-10!!! Piece of cake! (But the goal is to write something awesome and submit it for publication.)