Cut and Paste To the Chase

Its time for a general update blog! Every once in a while the out-of-context anecdote just won't cut it and a cut-to-the-chase style blog is necessary. Let the running with scissors begin:

Weather:
Its important to start a CTTC blog with environment. This, I believe, gives one a better mental picture of what everything else looks like. Instead of imaginging me trudging through the wet elements, you should know that I have been enjoying warm breezes and a much missed mr. sunshine! We still go through rainy days here and there, but overall we're moving towards the summer months, and it really fills me with a new drive to be a human being again.

Exercise/Health:
Another biggie on the context list. With the drive to be human came the reinstated drive to get back on the path of getting this little bit of extra weight off. And, don't forget why! I hate the stigma of people thinking that I'm doing it to be with the hip crowd who's always worried about 5 pounds here and there and go on grapefruit exclusive diets that would probably destroy my insides if I tried them.
I'm essentially back where I was when I last wrote about this: hovering between 152 and 153. This time, though, I feel significantly better about it since I am exercising regularly. The last few weeks I have been walking almost every morning and certainly get some movement in somewhere in the day. Its easy to do in nice weather. This week I started a program that will hopefully make me capable of jogging again. Its a jog/walk routine that is set up to train for a 5k race. I'm not terribly interested in such things, but I am interested in being able to jog again as I have missed it since I stopped in high school. Alex is doing it with me too and its actually been a lot of fun having his silly motivation along for the ride.

Alex:
Speaking of which! He's still doing the graduate school gig, but he's getting close to the finish line. The unfortunate part is that the job market is, as we are all aware, shit. It seems to be hitting his field especially hard, but I think that speaks for itself. He might extend school for a bit because of it, but he recently was hired by a firm for the purpose of photography and we are holding out hope that this could be a foot in the door gig for him. This job is actually very exciting! He is technically a private contractor rather than working for the company, but he did some excellent networking to be given it and I'm really proud of him for putting himself out there like this.

School:
You've heard about Alex, now you can hear about mine. There were not many course choices this term in the Math Ed department. Many of the strict mathematics courses were in their second and third terms rather than their first, and education courses were virtually non-existent. It left me with two doctorate level courses looking at very similar areas of mathematics education.
This difficult part of this is that I just started graduate school, and I have no practical experience in the mathematics classroom to boot. My 9 month stint in a 6th grade math classroom as an aid isn't affording me much help, and my tutoring is not as of much use as I would have hoped it would be either. Take a lack of experience and add to it a lack of residual knowledge from my undergraduate program and you're produced an equation for a mess, at least in terms of my emotional stability.
Its getting better, and today I finally realized that it was imperative that I purchase an Abstract Algebra text book (mine mysteriously disappeared... and I'm not happy about it). Luckily the bookstore carried the exact text that I used as an undergraduate, so I am very excited that I've at least seen it written this way before.

Work:
.....
Its work. It pays the bills. I'm simply waiting until I have completed enough graduate credits to be eligible to teach at PCC. We'll see what happens when the time comes.
The neat thing that has happened though that is slightly school and slightly work related, is that another student in one of my courses, obviously a doctorate student, has invited me to view her classes. She seemed to reach out to me the first day of class, and on this past Monday collected my e-mail (she had given me hers but I was both busy and chicken) and started directly inviting me to learn from her and be involved in the things that she was doing professionally. She invited me to view her classes, and offered to ask her colleagues if I could view theirs, she informed me of a conference happening next friday which I think I might attend and which is put on by a professional society that it could be important for me to be a part of, and she offered to carpool with me to an experimental course being taught at another community college that she has been attending and that I would love to be able to go to, but it unfortunately conflicts with work...
I will likely be attending her Tuesday classes for the remainder of this term and might be attending her summer courses as well. I am considering the conference (there is one next week and one in Vegas in November that she will be presenting in) and am just a little in shock of her sudden presence in my life. It will sound cliche, but it feels like a blessing as I have been hoping for a mentor to appear in my life (other than family) for almost 3 years now. I won't hold my breath that she would be this person, but it feels like what I always hoped a mentor would be for me. Here's to crossing our fingers.

I think that about sums everything up for right now. If you think of anything I should have included, maybe I'll blog about it next week :)