The Break

It has been a year and a half since I last wrote on this site, and that is quite unfortunate as I am a writing professor (who should practice what she teaches). It has been a busy year and half, though.

I left teaching with the local school board and embarked on a crazy busy year of adjuncting as a composition professor at THREE different local colleges: my alma mater, the local Christian university, and the local community college. Fortunately, I am extremely organized, so once I adapted to my schedule each semester I was able to, I believe, successfully teach my students the basics of writing for college.

I then taught a 14-day composition 2 class: 14 students for three hours every day. I told the students that their brains would explode at some point as we had quite a bit of writing to cover in such a short time period. My brain exploded on the fourth day. After the students had a good laugh, they realized that they would make it through the compressed semester. I am still in contact with a few of those students, and I am gladdened by the fact that they keep telling me how much they learned in those 14 days. I did not think that was possible, but it was through hard work from both the students and me.

I now adjunct as a composition professor at the local community college. This is wonderful for me as I get to teach students on campus and travel to two different high schools where I teach composition as a dual enrollment class. I was saddened when I left the school board because I thought that I would no longer be able to teach high school students, but half to two-thirds of my teaching schedule is teaching high school students.

And now, in less than a week, I will return to graduate school myself. I will spend the next few years slowly working towards an MA in English through Arizona State University's New School of Interdisciplinary Studies (online). It is the only accredited interdisciplinary online MA program that I was able to locate. I've already spent this semester getting to know my enrollment coach, my academic coach, and my faculty advisor. My two classes are Approaches to Research (which should be a refresher course since I took a similar class for my MEd. (2005) and Cross-Cultural Studies. Fortunately, I earned my MEd. online (using dial up!), so this time I will know a bit better how I function in an online environment. The sad part is that my husband won't be taking these courses with me as he is already employed full time as an English professor.

I'm sure much of my writing for my classes will end up here, so pay attention.