jeu 30 oct 2003
this is going to be a short entry because i am tired of things and don’t really know what to say except that my students are driving me crazy even though i thought things had been going rather well in the last 3 weeks but this last week has just been tough on me because they use and abuse of my patience and kindness and now think that turning their papers late or not doing homework is just fine and dandy and i know it’s my fault because i have been way too nice and have made way too many exceptions for way too many students until today so why would things change, really, but this is discouraging and i wonder if i shouldn’t just quit the teaching profession, although during my long discussion yesterday with my dear advisor, margie, i came to the conclusion that i should finish this phd even if i have no idea what i’ll do with it and plus margie said i didn’t have to be like everyone else and have the same academic goals as everyone else in our program, which is that people want a higher education teaching position and want to keep doing research and writing articles and such, but i’m not interested at all in that kind of stuff and i told margie that i felt like a fraud but she was very nice and said there were many jobs i would be great at outside of the academic world specifically and that she would help me find something good and the great thing is i know she will, because these people are just great which is also why i told her that too, that i didn’t hate this place and that i really could have landed in a much worse place, and actually considered myself lucky to be in such a nice « wrong » place, to which she laughed and replied that it was nice to have « different » kinds of students because that forced her to stay alert and i’m not sure this is a great thing and a compliment, but oh well, she could have said worse things i guess, and this conversation did make me feel a little better, although i seem to recall a very similar conversation we had about a year ago and i wonder if she doesn’t think i’m just a weirdo and a nutcase and she’s trying to help me finish fast and find a job so they can get rid of me, but i am hoping this is my low self-esteem talking again and not reason, which is often the case, and talking about reason we also discussed the fact that i want to take the « prelim » exams this summer, and not during spring break because i want to go to utah and i need to study a lot for the research part and also the theory part, although as margie said, they are not out there to get me, and she thought i’d do fine and gave me some old exam questions, which, really, don’t seem too bad except that you have to write four 1000 word decent papers in 24 hours which definitely seems difficult to me, especially when i was looking at the research questions, since the questions are written by a research teacher whose class i didn’t take and although i did take a couple of research class, i know that this will not be exactly the same and this scares me to death but at least the curriculum and the sociolinguisitcs sections seem doable and reasonable, and the theory section seems doable too if i study a little before the exam which is why i will take the exams during the summer and not in the spring as i had initially intended but am now finding myself too scared and lazy to do so early and during the semester, so there, now i know what i need to study during my chrismas break and winter/spring/summer semesters and i’m very excited as you can imagine, and to tell you the truth, maybe i am, because once i’m done with that, it’ll feel like i’m really closer to the end, even though i’ll still have to get the dissertation done, but once the coursework and the prelims are done, that’s about half the work done, but since this all seems very scary and hard, and since i don’t really feel like working on the long and tedious annotated bibliography i have to do for my sociolinguistics class or grading my students’ final drafts of their supposedly comparison/contrast papers, i will deal with it as i deal with all complex and scary issues i face: i will go to bed, so goodnight people of this world, be well, do good work, and keep in touch, as my morning friend garrison says!
