Grad school

Woah, Mondays and Wednesdays are long days. Class from 9-12 and 4:30-7. The afternoon class is a 45-minute drive away from the other class, so that gives me about three hours in the middle of the day to read assignments or complete research or eat Trader Joe's sushi inside Barnes and Noble before an hour and a half in the gym. As for the two classes, I'm going to attempt to combine the major project I have for each respective course using the same basic topic. It's either going to be vocabulary development, something to do with critical reading, or something to do with grammar.

This afternoon, I typed up and printed out my first "paper" in five years. It's a position paper on No Child Left Behind. It was fairly easy to write; the act is a mess that provides incentives to accept mediocrity, but I'm basically happy that it's made education part of the national debate. I was using a word processing program that didn't let me see how many pages I had written, so I wrote until I felt like I had said enough, and it was already five pages - the professor had said two to three. I whittled it down some before I printed it out. That's due tomorrow; the assignment due on Friday will be intense and take several hours to complete. I realize this and recognize that tomorrow will be a late night and I'd be better off doing it tonight, but it's hard to work ahead when you're taking a daily three-hour class that has about that much work every night.

I'm basically loving it, though. Being a student again rocks. I feel like I'm getting a second chance not to be a crummy college student, which I was for my first two or three years of school.