Thursday, February 28, 2008

if you've ever wondered about graduate school...

then this might be the post for you.

today is thursday, so i have my 6-8:30pm class on composition theory with harvey.

at 5:30pm i left my apartment quite frantically with all sorts of books and papers to turn in and papers to grade and two different bags and you get the idea. i got to campus just in time to drop some stuff off, say hello to a few people, and then we all headed upstairs to the writing center for class. well, six o'clock came and went and there was no harvey to be found. turns out that he had an eye appt this afternoon and told one of our classmates that if he wasn't there by 6:15pm, we should all go home.

so...we sat in the hallway (the writing center was locked) and waited for 6:15pm to come. around 6:04pm, we all got excited about the prospect of a class-free night. being good graduate students, by 6:15pm we had decided as a group to have class on our own.

i'm not even kidding.

voluntarily, we went down to the wick's room. we asked pat to unlock it for us since it was after english dept hours, and we had class without the instructor. we went over our readings. we did our presentations (one of which was mine) and we had our own class. one guy was determined to make it quick, so he kept us moving through the three presentations, but we could have gone the entire time. we discussed the four articles for about an hour and fifteen, i'd say. and we didn't get distracted or off topic. are you ready for the kicker?

we enjoyed it. i know, it's crazy. we had a free pass to leave, but we decided that rather than get further behind in the readings, we wanted to keep going. it still makes me laugh. after class, we all happily turned in paper proposals and our article annotations and said our goodbyes.

i went to dunkin donuts and graded 16 papers in 3 hours. i don't know if you know, but that is remarkable. they are revisions, but still. that's fast.

so...now i'm back in the apartment and i'm going to watch a bit of dirty dancing and go to sleep. jack the ripper will handle itself in the morning. who really plans class anymore anyway? besides, today i turned in 2 project proposals, represented stuculty at one meeting, gave one class presentation, read and annotated 3 comp theory articles, and graded sixteen 101 papers. tomorrow at 12pm spring break starts.

all of a sudden, i feel like crying. or laughing? eh...no matter, i'm not doing either. just staring at the computer with the most stoic look on my face. okay, now i'm laughing.

oh, and mom:
Photobucket
Photobucket
i promise to one day have my camera with me when i see the beautiful parts of snowy maine. the college park parking lot is not one of those places, i assure you.

3 comments:

Amanda said...

sorry the pictures are offensively large, i don't feel like messing with them. :)

Anita said...

My word...how are we related??? I'm glad to hear there one sane one in the group (the guy that kept y'all moving so that you at least got out early). And that snow - CRAZY!! I ran out of youth group last night because I heard it was snowing only to find it had already stopped. I'd be a mad woman up there in your multiple weather "events".

trresa said...

I would have been home at 6:16 but then again that's why you're in graduate school.

Thanks for the pics! Maine was beautiful when we were there in August and even though we know it's snowing (etc) there, I always see it beautiful in my mind...sorry manda. Have a wonderful "spring" break!!!