Education: March 2007 Archives

Three o'clock rolled around today and found me in my office at school. This morning saw me head to band practice at 8:00 a.m., only to sit through the entire practice without playing. I'd missed Tuesday's practice and hence the music handout, and they gave my music to the bass clarinetist who sits next to me, but he missed today's practice, so I was out of luck. The plan after band was to head back to the office and do some hardcore studying for my 2:30 p.m. geography test. Instead, based on my on-campus-ness and thus proximity to the university library, I decided to work on something that required the library. My paper for Technical Writing, which is turning into quite the massive tome on gifted education, is just such a something. So I spent from 9:00 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. on Ebsco (a collection of databases for searching out academic articles) and cross-referencing with the UNO library to see what I could actually get my hands on. I wound up with about thirty journal articles and books altogether, with call numbers and all. I followed this up with a trip to the library. It took me about an hour to comb through the library, find my books, determine which journal articles were actually worth photocopying, and so on. I nabbed lunch, headed back to my office, ate, and power-studied for geography for an hour. The test was easy - took all of thirty minutes. Which brings me back to my office at 3:00 p.m., when I receive a call from my tutoring student. "I don't really have anything new to go over this week," she tells me. "And I did really well on my last test." This matched my expectations, as last week she was all over her thermodynamics equations like they were hot boys and she was two years older. So I called my buddy Glen about a ride. No va, you see, 'cause he's got strep throat. I was left with the proposition of sitting in my office until Sam could come fetch me around 7:00 p.m. Whine, whine, whine. So I get this bright idea: I'll take the bus. Yeah! It'll be like an adventure. I'll write about it on my blog - do a review of the Omaha MAT system. It'll be sweet. So I go to their website and look up a route and schedule. Because of some convoluted construction at my pickup point, I call and ask where I should be waiting such that I actually do get picked up. By the time I have this idea and all of the information, it's 4:40 p.m., so I pack up and head for the shuttle. The shuttle takes me to Crossroads Mall. I go where the nice lady told me to. It's 4:50 p.m., which means I have twenty-five minutes to wait - I just missed the previous bus. No big deal. I wait. 5:15 p.m. rolls around, though, and there is no number eight eastbound. Mind you, I'm standing here on the sidewalk; there's no enclosure, no bench, and it had rained earlier, so sitting on the ground was a no-no unless I didn't want to wear these pants again tomorrow. Five buses swing past me. It's not until 5:45 p.m. that I actually see a number eight. I lift a hand so the driver can tell I'm waiting, adjust the 60-pound backpack on my back, pick up my bassoon case, and step to the curb. The driver blows right by me. I am very much at that moment saying, "What the fuck?" in my head. The driver apparently snaps to the realization that I had business with her about 100 feet past me. She pulls to a stop, and I run after her with all of the aforementioned luggage. She opens the door. "This is eastbound, right?" I ask. "...not yet, no. I'm just on my way this way. If you want to catch the eastbound, you need to be on the other side of the mall." I look at her dumbly as she says this. "Uh. Ok -" I say, coming to my senses, "- how long will it be before you're eastbound?" Crossroads, I reasoned, is the tail end of this route. It only made sense that she'd be eastbound in short order. "Oh -" she says, and starts counting by fives. "...ah, thirty-five minutes? I go on break here." I am crushed. "Nevermind, then," I say. I really don't want to sit on the bus for that long. In that time, I could very nearly walk home. It's only two miles, after all. She drives off, and I (crushed as I am) start crying. (Did I mention that I'm a wee bit hormonal at the moment? Between monster cramps and the emotional rollercoaster I hit, you should really consider investing in cookies before you approach me.) I pull my phone out of my pocket, as Sam had told me he could leave as early as 5:30 p.m. to come get me. (I had wanted to avoid this - his school schedule requires him to adhere pretty closely to his work schedule to make forty hours.) I tearfully ask him to come get me, explain where I am, and wait. So, I was going to do a rider experience report, and here it is. I never got to ride your stinky buses, Omaha Metro Area Transit. You gave me the wrong fucking directions when I called, and shat on an otherwise decently productive day. I should have listened to my instincts and avoided you at all costs in the first place. No love, Erica

I currently have the best job I've ever had in my life, as a teaching assistant in the physics department at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Twice a week, I give a lecture on basic Newtonian physics (classical mechanics, mostly, plus a smattering of thermodynamics) that runs somewhere between 25 and 40 minutes. Following that, I assist anywhere between one and two dozen students through experiments using the material from my lecture. Each student turns in a writeup on the lab experiment a week later, which I then grade and hand back a week after that. I love my job. I really do! I love teaching, I love helping students, and I love physics at the level I teach. The money's not bad at all, either. But I've also been in a lot of jobs that weren't so great. I spent years in corporate America, where being five minutes later could mean a thirty minute lecture, or not making someone ultimately happy could mean your ass. That sort of experience fosters a sort of unhealthy paranoia and fear that can seriously eat you up. I very highly doubt that corporate life will ever be a direction I pursue again. As an instructive example, a little more than two weeks ago, I overslept my Saturday morning class. I was supposed to be there at 8 o'clock in the morning. At 8:25 a.m., I got a phone call. Me, bleary: ...hello? Student: Uh, where are you? Everybody left. Me, coming to: ...oh, crap! Student: What should I do? It's just me and one other kid here. Me: Uh. Ok, just - you and one other student? Alright. Go home, we'll make up the material next week. I hung up the phone and proceeded to FREAK OUT HARDCORE, as those who were online (or in the address book in my phone and under suspicion of having some sort of applicable wisdom) can tell you. I immediately emailed my boss, and proceeded to bite my nails waiting for repercussions that never came. I never heard back from him about it. Fast-forward to today. I'm talking with the department secretary about an email I sent her. "I haven't gotten anything from you," she tells me. My freakout starts all over again. What if, I hypothesize (as scientists are so good at), my boss never received my email explaining and apologizing for my absence and seeking guidance? If I go and talk to him and he didn't receive it, I look irresponsible and avoidant. If I don't go talk to him and he didn't receive it, he could find out about the debacle from someone else - ever more irresponsible and avoidant. So I go talk to him, stomach in knots. "Boss," I say, inserting his actual name instead of the word, "I'm wondering if you got an email from me about two and a half weeks ago?" He tells me he had, and he respon-- oh, wait, did he respond? He talked to the department head in case there were any students who complained or asked about it. The thrust of the advice - to teach the material even if there wasn't time for the experiment - was exactly how I'd been handling it. "I know how hard it is to wake up and realize you overslept," he said. "I'm not going to beat you up over it. I did appreciate hearing about it right away, though." I thanked him, and went on my way. ...and promptly started crying on the way back to my office. I really hadn't understood just how much stress I was carrying around simply not knowing everything was ok with this job-that-I-love. Neurotic to my last. (P.S. For those who may go :( at this entry, please note that I feel much better now.)

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