...If I Live to Be C!

Happy 100th Friday's Feast! (30 June 2006)

Appetizer On average, approximately how many times per day do you yawn?
Probably at least a dozen. I'm still not used to my wife's sleep schedule yet.

Soup What was your most memorable school field trip?
While I'm tempted to list the same trip that Dilliwag did (and for the same reason), I'll go with something a little different. On the way back from the state track meet one year, we stopped at a rest stop and the coach lost the keys to the school car we were traveling in. We had to wait for a rival school's team bus (Eaton) to pick us up and take us the remaining 100+ miles home.

Salad Fill in the blank: I was extremely __________________ this week.
'Relieved.' I got resolution to a few key issues these past seven days.

Main Course Which color do you think of when you hear the word "soothing"?
The color of the western sky at sunset. It's a color I don't get out to see often enough.

Dessert What is something that, if you had to, you could save up the money to buy within one month?
A laptop, probably a used one. With my going back to school in a distance learning situation, I think it'll help. It may have to wait for the financial aid residual, though.

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* Bonus points to whomever can give the reference for this week's title. Go.

Auto-Defenestration

(NOTE: If you haven't read my post about the difficulties with teacher certification yet, read that one before you read this one. None of this will make sense if you don't. Go ahead, read it. I'll wait.    ::whistles::    Read it now? Good.)

Okay, so it looks like I won't be teaching in the fall as I had planned. So what do I do now?

It's interesting what you can learn in conversations you have with people at random. Take, for example, the previously-referenced conversation with the guy at the Jordan School District. Sure, he told me all about how the ARL (Alternative Route to Licensure) process worked, and a lot more accurately than the guy at the Utah State Office of Education (USOE) had. But he said something else, too. He told me, without coming right out and saying so, that the whole ARL process was a bad idea, at least in his mind. He related a story of someone with a doctorate in physics who just couldn't cut it as a teacher under ARL. He told me that with the time and money I'd spend to get certified, I could almost go back to school and get a master's degree. And he said that teachers with a master's degree start out making significantly more than other teachers do.

I wasn't entirely convinced that he was speaking in my best interest and not his (or his district's) own—which is fine; that's his job. Still, with the various obstacles to ARL that popped up, my mind went back to this conversation and I started to think about going back to school. I checked into a couple of local schools to see about their master's degree programs. And I met with the Education department advisor at my alma mater, the University of Utah. I told her a little about my experiences there, the classes I'd already taken, and so forth. Her first question to me was: "What's your GPA?" And that was pretty much the end of that conversation. She said, based solely on my grade point average, that my chances of making it into the master's program at the U were "basically zero". You know all those folks who say, "Once you graduate, nobody cares about your GPA"? Not so. That only applies if you're not interested in going back to school again. Ever.

Nonetheless, she gave me another option to consider in our conversation. She said that with the classes I'd already taken, plus the fact that I now had a bachelor's degree, I'd probably have no problem being accepted into the U's undergraduate education program in February. All I'd need to do is enroll in the U under a second bachelor's program, take the one or two classes I needed to complete the pre-cohort requirements, and make sure I had everything in order for my application. That was good news. The bad news was how long it would take. Assuming I was accepted in February—which was by no means guaranteed, the advisor's encouraging words notwithstanding—I'd start the cohort program in Fall 2007, then do student teaching in Spring 2008. So, basically another two years. Still, this looked like as good an option as I'd heard so far, so I went ahead and reapplied to the U and was accepted.

In the mist of all this, I had another interesting conversation. I've been volunteering at a local branch of the Salt Lake City Library. I was talking to the branch director about my ongoing search for employment, and he told me about Western Governors University. He said he knew some people who'd used that school and had good results, and recommended that I check it out. So I got on WGU's web site and took a look around.

For the unfamiliar, as I was a couple of weeks ago, Western Governors University was established jointly in 1997 by the governors of nineteen states and territories^‡, primarily in the western United States, as a private, non-profit university. The goal was to use emerging technologies to provide higher education opportunities to those who lived in locations that might otherwise prevent them from doing so. It offers distance learning programs online, with support from faculty mentors. The programs are proficiency-based, meaning that you progress from one course to the next when you've proven that you've learned what you need to know from each course. So if you're a quick learner, or if you've had previous experience with the material, you can progress faster.

I'll admit that I was initially a little wary about all of this. I know there are a lot of 'degree factory' schools out there that have you pay a lot of money, take a lot of classes, and then give you a 'degree' that doesn't mean much. So I felt some relief to learn that WGU is fully accredited, just like my alma mater, the University of Utah. This was starting to look more and more like a legitimate option.

Anyway, I started looking at what WGU offered for prospective teachers. Their post-baccalaureate programs for secondary science teachers looked promising, so I requested more information. It turns out that they have both a certification program and a master's program. I submitted an application and got a call to speak with one of their enrollment counselor in detail about the program(s). In that conversation we determined that the master's program would work well for my situation. So I ordered a transcript from the U and filled out the FAFSA.^† My counselor sent me a detailed program description (11 pages in .pdf format) and scheduled me for an intake interview.

That interview was yesterday. I talked with another enrollment counselor who asked me a lot of very direct questions to see if I understood what was involved with the program and determine if I'd be able to handle it. He seemed pleased with my understanding of the process. He told me how things would start and what I'd do in the first few weeks of the program. He also answered a few questions that I had come up with. I left the intake interview feeling very encouraged about my future.

Long story short: On August 1st, I start the master's program at WGU. In the time it would have taken me to earn the certification at the U or through ARL, I'll have both the certification and a master's degree. This is encouraging to me. Not only will this give me the additional knowledge and experience I need to be successful, but I think it will help me to be more confident as a teacher as well.

In the previous post, I said I believe that God opens a window whenever He closes a door. This is the kind of window I've been looking for, and I'd be crazy not to jump through it.

When I was in high school, I was on the cross country team for three years. (Not that you can tell now....) I remember one meet in Cheyenne my sophomore year. I'd had two sodas at lunch that day, and they came back to haunt me. Somewhere in the second mile of a 5K race, I had stomach cramps so bad that I had to drop out. I remember how awful that felt, watching everyone else finish from the sidelines. The hour-long ride home was one of the worst single hours of my life. I swore to myself I'd never drop out of a race again.

And I never did. I finished last in our league JV championship race all three years, twice with stomach problems and once with an ankle injury. But I finished. I learned from that experience that I can endure just about anything if I decide that I want to and if I do whatever is in my power to do (e.g., not drinking two Cokes at lunch on race day).

I guess this is a similar situation. I thought, after all these years, that I'd finally made it to the finish line last December. But graduating from college has always been a means to an end: teaching. Teaching is what I want to do, something I enjoy based on my experience so far, and something I'll be good at by all current indications. Teaching's the goal. That's what I'm ultimately working for. What I thought was the finish line was really just a mile marker along the road. And that's okay. I'll pass as many of these mile markers as I have to get to the real finish line.

I've come so far in this race that it doesn't make sense to quit now. If getting to the finish involves two more years of classes, student teaching, and even more student loans, then so be it. I'm in this race to finish it.

Just keep racing. Just keep racing. Just keep racing.

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^‡ The "Member Governors" of WGU include the governors of Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Washington, Wyoming, and Guam. Conspicuously absent from this list is California.

^† This is an experience I thought I'd never have again. The results are encouraging, though. With both of us being in school for the coming year, the financial aid situation looks very favorable.

No Alternative

At a critical point in my undergraduate career, I was faced with a dilemma. I had applied for acceptance into the Education program at the University of Utah. My application was declined, partly because of the number of remaining classes I had to take, and partly because although I was scheduled to take the Praxis I series of standardized tests, I hadn't actually taken them yet. So I talked to the chemistry department advisor about options. Instead of remaining in school for an additional year to reapply to the Education program (and rack up another year's worth of student loans), he gave me an alternative: get the chemistry degree, then go through the alternative licensure program the state offers to get my teaching certificate. There's enough demand for science teachers, he said, that there shouldn't be any problems doing it this way.

Unfortunately, that's not the way it's turning out.

I've sent a large number of résumés out over the last few months and filled out applications to almost every district along the Wasatch front. And I've received some interest from a couple of districts. But nothing of any substance has really materialized. It's beginning to look like the Alternative Route to Licensure (ARL) is not going to be much of an alternative to me after all.

The difficulties really started in February or so. I got a nibble from the Davis County School District. I talked to someone in their HR department, and she referred me to a man at the Utah State Office of Education (USOE). This man walked me through what was required in the ARL process, and I thought I had a pretty good idea what to do. I left that conversation with the impression that I needed to get a serious offer from a district before anything could really start happening.

Anyway, a few weeks ago, I finally got an interview with the Jordan School District. I met with a man who was pleasant enough and seemed interested in my skills. However, he told me the district couldn't even look at me until I had the ARL approval letter from the USOE—the letter I'd thought I couldn't even request until I had a firm offer from a district. He went through as much of the interview as possible with me, then took a few minutes to walk through the ARL process with me. Armed with this new knowledge, I resolved to take on the ARL process as quickly and efficiently as possible.

The process basically involves four steps, each with their appropriate fees:

1. Send in an ARL Intent Form with an original college transcript and $50 Evaluation fee. The USOE looks over the information and determines eligibility for the ARL process.
2. Once initial eligibility is established, a background check, fingerprinting, and other paperwork are required. The fee for these services is $70.
3. Assuming one passes the background check, a district can hire them provisionally and set up an evaluation plan. The candidate gets their own classroom and as much attention and mentoring as the school can spare. The candidate's progress is monitored as they teach classes and completes the necessary coursework for licensure. While this is ongoing, the prospective teacher also arranges any classes they need to take to meet the state standards. A $270 evaluation fee is assessed when the plan is implemented, plus tuition for any and all necessary classes.
4. Finally, if the candidate makes it through all of this, a teaching certificate is granted. An additional $50 licensure fee is charged at this point.

So it's a long, involved, and expensive process. But if that's what I had to do, then I was okay with that. I downloaded the ARL Intent Form, got a copy of my transcript from the U, wrote the check, and sent it all off to the USOE.

I got the results back couple of weeks ago, and they weren't encouraging. The person who had evaluated my transcript—the same man from the USOE I had spoken with earlier, as it turns out—wasn't convinced that my grades proved I had a sufficient knowledge of chemistry. It's true that I had a couple of semesters where my mind wasn't on my schoolwork. (In my own defense, I was going through a divorce at the time.) But I did manage to do well enough, eventually, to convince my department that I knew enough about chemistry to be granted a degree. And I had to pass the American Chemical Society's standardized battery of Senior Comprehensive Exams before my department would give me that degree. The fact that a department consistently rated in the top 10% in the nation chose to grant me a degree at all should mean something, I'd think.

The letter from the USOE said that I'd need to take (and pass) the Praxis II content exam for chemistry before the ARL process could continue. So I looked into it the other night. I was not encouraged, for two reasons. First, the test costs, from what I can tell, somewhere between $60 and $90 plus a $40 registration fee. Okay, I can live with that. Second, I can't take the test until August 5th. That's the real killer—another month and a half of waiting to take the test, and probably six to eight weeks waiting for the results before I can do anything else.

My dreams of starting a teaching job this fall are fading fast.

Now, I try to be optimistic about these things, and I am a believer that when God closes a door, He opens a window someplace. Fortunately, that has been the case in all of this. I'll write more about that in a later post.

Feast 99

I haven't done this for a while, so I decided I'd give this week's questions a shot.

Friday's Feast, 23 June 2006.

Appetizer On a scale of 1-10 with 10 being highest, how much do you like your job?
It depends. Sometimes it's around 8-9, and other times it's closer to 2-3. Overall, I give it a 7. It's not bad, but it's not something I intend to do for the rest of my life.

Soup When was the last time you think you were lied to?
I got an ID from someone at work last week that I'm reasonably sure was a fake.

Salad Share some lyrics from one of your favorite songs.
From "Cynically Yours" by Amy Rigby:
[spoken]
"I, your loving blank,
Do take insert name here,
Because frankly, I'm just too tired to look around anymore.
You drive reasonably well, have most of your own teeth
  and not much of a prison record, so that's good,
Plus you claim to love my a**, and I have a tape to prove it,
  which makes me think, this really could work.
However, if our mutual dissatsifaction
  outweighs the positive aspects of this union,
We agree to part
Without damage to crockery, automobiles,
  or one another's good name
  in print or in song
[resume singing]
At the end of the day, I've got nothing good to say
But you don't suck, so I'm cynically yours."

Main Course What do you do/take when you are in pain?
Buffered aspirin or Tylenol. The other stuff is too hard on my stomach.

Dessert Fill in the blanks: My __________ is very __________.
'Taste in music', 'Esoteric'

0-2-1

So, the United States soccer team was eliminated from second-round World Cup play yesterday. Granted, it was a long shot to begin with; assuming that the U.S. could beat Ghana, they'd still need help from Italy to advance. So in order to remove the drama, I suppose, the American squad just went ahead and lost their critical match 2-1. Final results for the U.S. team: three games, two loses, one draw, one goal scored—the goal credited to the U.S. in their game against Italy was actually kicked in by an Italian defenseman—and a last place finish in Group E. So it's three and out for the Americans, and the United States soccer team has still never won a World Cup game held on the continent of Europe.

We really shouldn't be surprised by all of this. Consider how U.S. national teams have performed in some other recent international competitions:

Basketball (Athens Olympics, 2004)
Lost to Costa Rica in the opening round of play. Lost in the semifinal round to Argentina. Eventually took home the bronze medal.

Hockey (Torino Olympics, 2006)
Won one game in the entire tournament. Eliminated in the first game of the medal round.

Baseball (World Baseball Classic, 2006)
Advanced out of the opening round with help. Eliminated in the second round.

To conclude, American teams can't win in international play in sports that the American people actually care about. Why would anyone think soccer would be any different?

For the Love of Pot Roast

As I mentioned earlier, we went on our first real grocery shopping trip last Friday. While we were there, I told her we should get a pot roast for Sunday dinner. I don't mean to brag, but I make a pretty good Crock Pot roast with potatoes, carrots, onions, yams or sweet potatoes, and various spices. (It's easy: just put everything in the pot on a Sunday morning, and by the time you get home from church on Sunday afternoon, it's ready to eat. So easy, even a bachelor can do it. Every man should own a Crock Pot.) Anyway, we bought a pork shoulder roast and all the veggies to go with it.

So Sunday morning rolled around, and I started getting things ready. I peeled and washed the potatoes and the yam. I layered the baby carrots and the potatoes at the bottom of the pot. Then I opened the roast.

It was bad. Not bad as in, "Wow, this roast is a little past its prime," but bad as in, "Merciful heavens, I didn't think meat could even be this color."^† It was only bad on the bottom, so there was no way to know it was bad until I actually opened to package. Once I did, though, it was obvious that there was a problem before I even took the roast out. So I slapped the offending roast into a big plastic bag, along with the price tag from the original package, and put it into the freezer. I also put the chopped veggies into plastic bags so I could use them with the replacement roast that we were certainly going to get from the store.

After our chiropractic visit on Monday morning, we took the roast back to the store. When the customer service lady asked what she could do for us, I put the still-frozen roast, bad side up, on the counter and said, "We need to return this roast. It's somewhat discolored." Her response was a bit more succinct: "That looks bad." So she gave us a full refund, and we made our way back to the meat section.

After just a couple of minutes, we found a nice beef roast as a replacement. We were able to verify the condition of this roast before buying it, so we felt pretty good about that. We took it home, I got the veggies out of the fridge, and in about 20 minutes, the cooking of Monday night's dinner was underway.

Until the power went out, that is.

We've noticed that the power occasionally flickers here at the new place. We'll get home some nights to find the VCR flashing, that sort of thing. But Monday was the first time we'd actually been home for it. We waited for a little while, but the power didn't come back on. So I went upstairs to ask the landlady about it. She said that the power did go out from time to time—but only on our side of the street. What the...? She said she'd call to see what was going on. Sure enough, a few minutes later, she called back to say we'd lost power, but only on our side of the street. The rest of the neighborhood was fine.

We'd been powered down for about an hour at this point, and the Crock Pot was starting to get cold. So I called my old roommate, who lives just a couple of blocks away, to ask if they had power. They did, and he said it'd be okay for us to come over and plug in our dinner until the electricity came back on or until it was done cooking. So I returned to the old house and plugged it in. Then we went to run a few errands, including some school/financial aid stuff (more on which later). We called the landlord about 7:30, and he told us they had just restored power a few minutes before. So we went back home, with a short detour to get our roast, and had dinner.

And I have to tell you, the roast was good. Really good, in fact. It was tasty and moist, moreso than I can usually manage. Nancy was impressed. It makes me wonder if I should turn the Crock Pot off for an hour and a half every time I make a roast....


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^† I can't prove it, but I think it may have been an incident like this that drove Diliwag to vegetarianism.

Pickin’ on the Hicks

Two quick jokes for all you loyal readers out there:

A student at a prominent midwestern college had just bought a new sweatshirt, but was difficulty figuring out how to wash it. Finally, he shouted at someone across the Laundromat, “What setting should I use to wash this shirt?”

“I don’t know,” the other guy shouted back. “What’s it say on the shirt?”

The student looked closely for a moment, then shouted, “University of Nebraska!”

--

Two football players were taking a test for the University of Nebraska’s ‘Music Appreciation for Athletes’ class, when one whispered to the other, “What’s the answer to this question?”

“I don’t know. What’s the question?”

“It’s fill-in-the-blank: ‘Old MacDonald had a blank’.”

“You dumb beefer! The answer is ‘farm’. Old MacDonald had a farm!”

“Oh, right. Thanks!” Then after a few moments, he said, “Hey!”

“What now?”

“How do you spell ‘farm’?”

“You stupid beefer, don’t you know anything? E-I-E-I-O!”

Random Observations

There's a billboard near where I live that advertises Coffee-mate Soy Creamer. It has a picture of a bottle of the product on the left, and a picture of some woman's well-toned torso on the right. Across the middle it has the following slogan: "Feeling good meets looking good."

Is it just me, or does anyone else find it odd that the billboard says nothing about tasting good?

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A woman got on the bus this morning with her knitting. I couldn't help but think that in this post-9/11 world, she'd be arrested as a terrorist if she tried to bring her knitting onto an airplane.

I guess it's good that a) I'm not planning on taking any long airplane flights soon and b) that my preferred way of passing time on long flights isn't knitting. I'd be screwed.

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We had our first real grocery shopping experience together yesterday. We were in the grocery store for a little over an hour and spent about $120. Our fridge and our pantry (yes, we have a pantry) are fully stocked.

When I was getting ready for work today, the only thing that looked appealing was cold cereal. Am I pathetic, or what?

Guilty Pleasure

Over the past couple of weeks, Nancy has been introducing me to the TV show Scrubs. We've made it 2/3 of the way through the first season on DVD, and I love it. I'm not usually such a big fan of sitcoms, especially recent sitcoms. But I love this one, and Nancy figured out why:

Dr. Cox gets to say to his interns all the things I wish I could say to my employees.

Watch it, and you'll understand.

Slam, Bam, Thank You Ma'am

So after training a couple of Saturdays ago, I got on TRAX and headed south to Sandy to meet Nancy for dinner and a showing of X-Men: The Last Stand. (See Army of Dorkness for my views, and Derek's, on the movie.) We went to Costa Vida for dinner, then headed to the theater to meet some friends for the show. On the way, our car got hit.

Here's what happened: We were stopped at a stop sign in the parking lot. As we were waiting for an opening in traffic, a Ford Explorer pulled up behind our little Nissan Maxima. The Explorer also came to a complete stop. We both watched a car go by. Then, apparently not seeing the car we were still waiting for, the lady in the Explorer gunned it. The impact pushed us 2-3 feet out into traffic.

We managed to get out of the road without being T-boned, and we started gathering information. The lady who hit us was just getting of a long shift at PetsMart, and she had been talking on her cell phone at the time. Long story short, she accepted full responsibility for the accident and offered to pay us directly for whatever damages we and our car may have suffered. It's not that she was worried about her insurance rates; she didn't want her husband to find out she'd been in an accident. Because he wouldn't have noticed the damage to her car, I guess. Anyway, after a few minutes of looking around, it became obvious this wasn't the kind of thing she'd probably be able to pay cash for. So we got her insurance information, and left for the theater. The car was thankfully still drivable.

(Small irony: The auto insurance on my car expired on May 24th, son on May 22nd, we signed up with a new insurance company for both of our cars. The wreck happened on May 27th. We hadn't even received the information packet in the mail yet.)

We called our new insurance company on the way to the theater and gave them all the information. They arranged for an adjuster to come look at the car the following Tuesday morning. His estimate for the damage: $865.32, none of which we were going to have to pay, fortunately. A day or two later, we got a call from the lady's insurance telling us they were accepting full financial responsibility for the repairs and asking us to take it to their preferred body shop. We took the car in on Monday of last week and drove off in a rental.

The following day we got a call from the said body shop. Their more extensive estimate was a bit higher: $2400. They said they'd discovered quite a bit more damage once they got the rear bumper off. So they were going to replace, repair, and repaint as necessary, a process which would take about a week.

So it's been just over a week now, and we're still in the rental. (It's a 2005 Ford Taurus, a nice enough car, but the visibility isn't great if you're tall and the seats are a little uncomfortable. And the milage isn't as good as the Maxima's. But otherwise, a nice enough car.) We got a call from the body shop today saying the replacement bumper they ordered came in damaged, so they're getting a replacement for the replacement. Then they'll send it to the paint shop, and we'll have it back after that. So another two or three days, it looks like.

Meanwhile, we've been dealing with minor injuries from the crash. Nancy felt neck and back pain immediately. I didn't but I've been really stiff since then. So Nancy called up one of her friends from Kentucky who happens to be a chiropractor and who just moved to Salt Lake City and joined a clinic near her Mom's house. So we've gone in three times now. The first time was for an initial examination, X-rays, and a little sales pitch about the benefits of the drug-free chiropractic treatment system. (Is it just me, or are all chiropractors zealots? I wasn't sure whether I was in a doctor's office or an Amway meeting.) The second time we went back for further indoctrination and a discussion of our results. We also got our first adjustment. Then yesterday we got a full adjustment. I have to admit, it feels good. I've had back troubles for a long time, and I can feel a difference. I just wish we could get the treatment without the hard sell.

So we're going back to the spine crackers tomorrow, and we should have our car back by the end of the week. Normality, here we come.

Musical Irony

When I got married, I got some new music along with my new bride. One of the best musical acquisitions is a classical collection called "Classics By Request". It features the London Symphony Orchestra and is sponsored by Victoria's Secret. Yes, that Victoria's Secret.

The collection is a five CD set of peaceful, soothing, and/or romantic classical pieces and excerpts. It's a nice selection of pieces, and the musicianship is of course outstanding. The only complaint I have is that they left out the most obvious piece for the collection:

"Air on the G String" by J.S. Bach.

Come on, if any classical piece cries out to be included on a Victoria's Secret box set, it's that one.