Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Summer Vacation in April!

That's right! You are reading the blog of a free woman. Well, mostly free. Exactly one week ago, come 8:53 tonight, I turned in my Paper of Doom, a.k.a Curriculum Project, a.k.a the music educator's equivalent to a Master's Thesis. So, assuming I get at least a B on it, I am now a 'Master' of music education (thank you, Boston University and Sallie Mae). Yippee! I really do feel like summer break has come two months early. Fun times are here to stay.

Or are they?

It was a week ago this afternoon that a conversation* took place between my superintendent and me that went something like this:

Sup: Nobody has any money, least of all the State, so we're looking at some potential program cuts for next year.
Me: "Program" means me, right?
Sup: Yes. Yes it does.
Me: I thought so.

...awkward pause...

Sup: You don't happen to have any additional endorsements,** you know, like in another subject, do you?
Me: no.
Sup: Did you take any classes in college that might, in a pinch, be equivalent to one?
Me: Well, sir, I took a year of German when I was a freshman.


It is more than a little ironic that I, who have accumulated something like 230 credits over my four-and-a-quarter years at SPU, really took relatively few classes outside of the core curriculum and my chosen field. I sort of double majored in music education and music composition. You might say that I minored, majored, and now (hopefully) mastered in music. All so that on the day I turn in my last paper, a paper that would mark the completion of an educational journey some twenty-odd years in the making, I could learn that if I want to keep teaching (without having to move back in with my parents) I will have to take more classes. (By the way, props to my dad: a lesser man would have said 'I told you so!' a long time ago.)

One week ago, I called my mom and had a good cry. Today, I have made peace with the fact that I will probably be taking classes of some sort or other until the day I die. I've decided that if I have to branch out, the most interesting area in which to branch would be linguistics (as in 'teaching English as a Second Language'). I've always liked thinking about grammar and semantics and such. And we're still concerned with making and interpreting sounds, so it's bound to have some element of fun to it, right? Maybe I'll finally pin down the ever-elusive logic behind proper comma usage. The only real problem is that more schooling=more school debt, and I've had just about as much of that as a girl can stand. I don't know how anyone could consider it at all fair that ++edited for content: excessive petulance++ Oh well, as Roy O'Bannon says in Shanghai Noon "The justice system's all screwed up."

So that's what's been happening around here. In other news, now that I'm not spending every waking moment researching and writing papers of doom, I have come to realize that if I actually washed all the clothes that I own (most of which have been 'handed down' to me), the combined space available in my dresser and my closet would be insufficient to hold them all. For a person who usually wears the same thing every week, this is ridiculous. Something must be done. Also, my 'recycling' pile is beginning to eat the rest of my kitchen. And I haven't talked to some of my friends in ages.

*sigh*

I wonder if there's anything interesting on hulu.

*This is not verbatim. It has been creatively altered for dramatic effect. My superintendent is a good and kind man who has been saddled with the difficult job of making decisions that no one wants to make, but that everyone is sure they could make better.

**endorsement: teacherspeak for 'little piece of paper that testifies to one's having taken enough of the right classes to be considered sufficiently competent in a subject to get paid for teaching said subject in school'.