Advanced Teaching and Learning Processes as cool as it sounds

As I suspected, class yesterday was a lot of fun. Whenever you hear graduate students raving about a professor, they usually aren't lying; they dole out praise pretty stingily. The woman who sent off the letter this summer, saying that the course was going to be super demanding and rigorous, turned out to be an unassuming motherly type who proclaimed the value of critical reflection in our teaching lives. She claimed that most of us, in our busy lives, spend about 15 seconds reflecting before moving on to the next subject. Ha - she doesn't know me very well. As a friend recently told me, I'm so reflective that, sometimes, hanging out with me is like "being around a god damn mirror."

So, I'll probably keep both classes, which will give me a semester of ultimate hell, but it will mean I'll be all done with my Master's Degree before the summer starts. This will free me up to do a lot of different things this summer, from travel to a summer teacher institute, as long as I save for the summer well. Last year, I saved pretty well all year - $200/paycheck - but had a pretty major financial crisis right at the start of the summer, and that made me pretty broke once August rolled around. But I also was taking classes, and, apparently, next summer that will be all over with. I'll glide into the 2008-2009 school year with a more than $7000 raise, and hopefully the financial straits of my life in the last few months will be over.

And hopefully this second job will be over, as I'm just ready to start having actual weekends sometime soon in my life. However, I admit yesterday at the restaurant was full of fun and laughs, thought not too much money. Today, I'm at the festival for the afternoon, and that should be fun (working outside in the fresh air, schilling pierogi and gulumpki), and then back at the restaurant for the evening. Sunday nights are usually lucrative, and hopefully I can make another big tuition payment on Monday or Tuesday. My balance of $3397 has come down quite a bit, but I still have quite a bit of work to do. I'm determined to do it, though, and perhaps even I'm going to do it without using any credit cards - all cash up front. Wouldn't that be cool? Towson is apparently using me to tear town half of itself and rebuild itself - there is so much freaking construction there, I can barely find my way around - and I wouldn't want to let it down.