Pretty Good Week

Things have been interesting for me over the last seven days or so. Here are the three main items that come to mind.

Be Our Guest
First, I went to an orientation for substitute teachers for one of the local school districts last Thursday. It was a lot different than I expected. I was expecting a lot of talk about policies and procedures, how to use SubFinder (the computerized telephone registration system the district uses), that sort of thing. We spent about 45 minutes of the 8:00-1:30 training session covering that. The rest of the time, we talked about being teachers.

This district has an interesting focus on the whole substitute teaching thing. They don't refer to us as substitutes. The term this district uses is 'Guest Teacher'. Sure, it sounds like just a semantic difference, but the attitude is similarly different. They expect productivity from their students when the regular teacher isn't there, and they train the replacements on how they're most likely to get it. I don't know that any other district in the area even gives their subs any training. The district I worked with last year certainly didn't.

This district also has an interesting pay scale. The other districts in the area, to my knowledge, have two pay rates for subs: a certified rate and a non-certified rate. This district has a whole scale based on education, experience, and the type of assignment. When I brought in the paperwork, I was told to bring in a copy of my transcript showing I was a college graduate. This put me in the Grade II pay scale. During the course of the training, though, I talked to the facilitator (Pam) and mentioned that I had just started working on a Master's degree. She said that made me a Grade IV—which raises my hourly wage by more than two dollars.^* She said the fact that I'm already enrolled in a degree program that will lead to licensure could also make me eligible for a full-time position under the right circumstances. I'd be all for that.

Anyway, I got a phone call a couple of days ago. It was from an algebra teacher in one of the district's schools. She's having surgery later this month, and she needs a substitute for 4-6 weeks. So we swapped information, and it looks like I'm going to be a full-time math teacher for a few weeks this fall. Shiny!

I got another call during gaming last night. It was a teacher at the district's technical high school downtown. She's going to a wedding next Thursday and Friday, and she needs someone to cover her anatomy and physiology classes. So it looks like my first crack at being a science teacher is now less than a week away—even if I'm only going to be a Guest Teacher. I'm pretty psyched.

Fun and Games
As I mentioned earlier, I've been gaming recently. I've been taking the express bus up to Ogden to hang out with the OGC three times a month or so. I've been doing that pretty consistently since the first of the year. It's been a lot of fun. I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed role-playing games, especially Champions.

After several months of playing a handful of different characters in different campaigns, I decided I was ready for the next step: GM'ing my own campaign. I haven't been a Game Master in years (literally), so this is kind of a big deal. And I decided to shoot the moon with it: a detailed, serial, epic-feeling campaign. The players are playing characters who have been gathered together secretly to try to prevent an alien invasion. We're two sessions in, and the players don't seem to be showing any signs of boredom just yet. That's a good sign. I've been trying to throw out a lot of detail, background information, and foreshadowing as we go. The players are responding well. Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen.

One Down
The first class in any program at Western Governors University is called Education Without Boundaries (EWB). It's intended to acquaint students with the distance learning process, to establish relationships between the students and with their mentor, and to assess the incoming students' content knowledge, writing skills, and the like. I finished EWB on Tuesday.

It was a much bigger deal than I thought it was going to be. I missed a couple of 'school days' at the beginning of August due to our road trip, and I seem to have lost a few more days in the middle of the month that I can't account for. Long story short, by the time I made my to-do list last Monday, I had two full weeks' worth of school work to do and 8 days to do it in.

So basically, I had two choices: get motivated, or panic. In the past, the panic option might have appealed to me. But that was before I was a college graduate. Now I know by experience that I can make it through practically anything—even quantum mechanics—if I set my mind to it. So I got motivated. I finished up Module Three, with the exception of one paper, by Thursday. Then I started on Module Four and stormed my way through most of that pretty quickly. By Monday, I had two papers left to write and two days in which to do them.

One of the two papers was to explore the evolution of a scientific theory and to explain how theories can change based on experimentation and evidence. We were to choose a theory and explore it in depth. This assignment was easy for me because I did almost exactly the same thing for a class two years ago as an undergraduate. In that class, I had to create a WebQuest assignment on some topic related to my content area. I did mine on atomic theory and The Evolution of the Atom. So I had not only a topic, but all the reference material I needed. I wrote the paper with minimal difficulty.

(By the way, can I just mention here how much I'm coming to dislike APA Style? I've been using ACS^** style for the past several years, and I'm used to that style for formatting, citations, and so forth. It's precise, but it's also flexible. It works for me. On the other hand, APA Style is far more rigid with regard to formatting, but the citations are a mess. The in-text citation style gets in the way of what you're reading, and the references themselves are vague. I could pull out something obscure from a 900-page textbook, and as long as I cite the author and year of publication, I'm fine. I don't even need to cite the page number! Do they really expect people reading a five-page paper to wade through a 900-page textbook to verify a source? What a joke.)

That left just one paper: a read-and-summarize exercise on the topic of biodiversity. This one gave me a lot of trouble. There were seven different electronic resources to explore on this topic. Five of them were informative but otherwise unremarkable web sites. The sixth was a 15-chapter online book. The last was a 59-page PDF document published by the Harvard Medical School. I was able to make sense of what I was reading (for the most part). But I had trouble trying to synthesize all of it into a 500-word paper.

I started the biodiversity paper on Thursday, and by Tuesday I still didn't have a much better idea what I was supposed to do with it. So I did some re-reading, took a few notes, and started writing, hoping that it would take me in some coherent direction. And after a while, I started to make some sense of it all. By 11:00 a.m., I had a good start on the paper.

Then the power went out.

We live in one of the older neighborhoods in Salt Lake City. The average house on our block was built in the 1950's or late 1940's.^*** The power grid seems similarly old, and we get power spikes about once a month. Sometimes they only last a few moments, but we had one earlier this summer that lasted more than 12 hours. I was hoping this would be one of the former. By 11:30 I'd given up that hope. So I disconnected my tower and hauled it to work.^*†

We have literally scores of computers where I work, so it wasn't hard to cannibalize a couple of them and get a mouse, keyboard, and monitor hooked up to my tower. Then I started back to work. I actually took advantage of another computer by looking up all the references on the work computer while typing on my own. As things started coming together, I began to realize that I was running about 100 words too long. Yes, verbosity can be a problem for me sometimes.^† So I started editing. Finally, at about 3:30, I finished the paper and submitted it. Mission accomplished.

I also got to talk to my Mentor on Tuesday night. We had a nice chat about what I'd done so far and what was coming up next. I don't know all the details, but it looks like it's going to get more complex, and more interesting, from here.

So, that's my pretty good week. It'll be interesting to see what next week brings.

--
^* Which still makes the hourly wage less than what I make at my 'real' job, but the experience is good.

^** For the curious, ACS is the American Chemical Society, and APA is the American Psychological Association. Maybe I'm biased, but I'm sensing a difference between hard science and soft science here.

^*** The amazing thing is that there are four different houses on our block for sale, and the least expensive one is $375,000. The highest price is $514,000. I had no idea I've been living in a neighborhood with half-million dollar houses.

^*† When I got home that night, I could tell by the time flashing on all the clocks when the power had come back on. It was within 15 minutes of when I'd left. Go figure.

^† This will come as no surprise to regular readers.