Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Valentine's Day Cakes!
Thursday, January 24, 2013
Jury Duty and Hiking
About a year ago, I got called in for jury duty. I deferred it because I was in college and couldn't miss class... I didn't realize it but I deferred it to the first week of my student teaching... which I couldn't miss either. They didn't call me in which I was thankful for and that was the end of it. However, I just got pulled for jury duty AGAIN. I thought that random meant that I wouldn't have to worry about it for a long time because there is a lot of people living in Georgia... so much for that theory. I (once again) have to defer it because I'm in the middle of my Masters. We'll see if I can get that settled... I think I'll do it in August. I'll be done with my Masters by then so it should work out. (update: got it postponed until May...apparently you can only postpone it for up to 90 days).
Last weekend was a long one because Monday was MLK Day! Saturday and Sunday were very lazy days. Me and Matt were going to go on a hike on Sunday but he HAD to watch the Falcons game (we lost-boo!). So we went hiking on Monday. We didn't get out the door until around 11 (we were aiming for 9-fail.) So we started hiking around 12. I had been pushing to go hiking, not because I particularly enjoy it, but because I want to be able to hike the Incan Trail in Peru. I'm actually a pretty poor hiker. I'm much better at horizontal things. Even my sport of choice, swimming, is horizontal. Since there isn't much around LaGrange for hiking we decided to go to Franklin D. Roosevelt Park in Pine Mountain.
So Sunday night, we had decided that we were going to hike the 4 mile trail, called Dowdell Knob Loop. However, when we got there we some how decided that we were going to do the Longleaf Loop which was 7 miles! For trail descriptions: http://www.pinemountaintrail.org/?page=9 So we got going. Matt has 2 CamelBaks so we both got one. They're pretty interesting.... I felt a little over prepared but they were nice. I actually ended up drinking all of my water! The hike was nice but I got pretty tired. The best thing for me though is to keep moving. Once I stop, it's hard for me to get going again. We finished the trail at 3pm and went to a bakery in town that has really good French bread. We got two loafs and then Matt went to Kroger to get some ham and cheese. I had stayed in the car while he went into Kroger and I fell asleep in the car. I was exhausted. And sore. We ate nearly all the food and then we went to bed early. Unfortunatly, the next day was Tuesday, so not only did I have work but it was swimming day! So we got up really early to go swim. It took me so long to get out of bed that morning that we only had 20 minutes to swim. That whole day I was so tired. I went straight home when I got off work and took a 2 hour nap. Then went to bed at 9pm. I got a long way to go before I'm even close to being able to hike the Incan Trail! But I knew that, which is way I want to get started now since I have a whole year to prepare! But I'm nervous about hiking again... that was tough!
Just a quick update on my study, I nearly have everything ready but it has been postponed for a week so I'm starting on Feb. 4th.
Last weekend was a long one because Monday was MLK Day! Saturday and Sunday were very lazy days. Me and Matt were going to go on a hike on Sunday but he HAD to watch the Falcons game (we lost-boo!). So we went hiking on Monday. We didn't get out the door until around 11 (we were aiming for 9-fail.) So we started hiking around 12. I had been pushing to go hiking, not because I particularly enjoy it, but because I want to be able to hike the Incan Trail in Peru. I'm actually a pretty poor hiker. I'm much better at horizontal things. Even my sport of choice, swimming, is horizontal. Since there isn't much around LaGrange for hiking we decided to go to Franklin D. Roosevelt Park in Pine Mountain.
So Sunday night, we had decided that we were going to hike the 4 mile trail, called Dowdell Knob Loop. However, when we got there we some how decided that we were going to do the Longleaf Loop which was 7 miles! For trail descriptions: http://www.pinemountaintrail.org/?page=9 So we got going. Matt has 2 CamelBaks so we both got one. They're pretty interesting.... I felt a little over prepared but they were nice. I actually ended up drinking all of my water! The hike was nice but I got pretty tired. The best thing for me though is to keep moving. Once I stop, it's hard for me to get going again. We finished the trail at 3pm and went to a bakery in town that has really good French bread. We got two loafs and then Matt went to Kroger to get some ham and cheese. I had stayed in the car while he went into Kroger and I fell asleep in the car. I was exhausted. And sore. We ate nearly all the food and then we went to bed early. Unfortunatly, the next day was Tuesday, so not only did I have work but it was swimming day! So we got up really early to go swim. It took me so long to get out of bed that morning that we only had 20 minutes to swim. That whole day I was so tired. I went straight home when I got off work and took a 2 hour nap. Then went to bed at 9pm. I got a long way to go before I'm even close to being able to hike the Incan Trail! But I knew that, which is way I want to get started now since I have a whole year to prepare! But I'm nervous about hiking again... that was tough!
Just a quick update on my study, I nearly have everything ready but it has been postponed for a week so I'm starting on Feb. 4th.
Friday, January 18, 2013
Jan Term
My Jan Term class is over! We met for the last time last night. On Tuesday, our guest speaker was a Math professor from the college. He was born and grew up in South Korea so he talked about the culture and education system of South Korea. The education system in South Korea seems very stressful. He gave us the schedule of a student's average school day: School from 7:00am-4:30pm, Mandatory (at school) self-study from 6:00pm-9:00pm, and then most students go to a cram school from 10:00pm-1:00am. He stated that South Korea has about a 97% graduation rate from high school (which is insanly high!). However, they also have one of the world's highest suicide rates. I can't even imagine having school that much! He also mentioned that we could learn Korean if we studied for about 4 hours- I highly doubt that.... He also talked about how it is normal for everyone, including children, to stay up at night, around 11pm. So that might explain why students might come to school tired. Overall, it was a very interesting lecture.
So now that I'm done with that class, I'm going to finish preparing for my study! I have to go into an elementary school and implement literature circles in the classroom and measure their improvement. I'm getting really nervous about this! I'm starting my study on January 28th and I made a list yesterday of all the things I still need to do.... it was a lot longer than I thought it was going to be.... Plus I'm just nervous in general because if I do something wrong during the study it's really hard to fix it! Most of the data will be collected on a day to day basis so if I miss a day, that messes everything up... Plus I'm worried that I won't get as much student participation as I want/need. I'm ready for this study to be over with and it will be on January 12th- that's my last day in the classroom. After that, all I need to do is gather and examine all the data that I got during those 10 days (and put that in my thesis) and then discuss and conclude in my thesis as well. I can do that. Plus I have a class next semester every Wednesday night: Reading in the Content Areas. I technically have a second class next semester as well (it's my thesis class) but we're only meeting 4 times, twice in February and twice in April. So I don't think I'm really going to count that as a "class".
So yesterday there was the threat of snow and/or black ice overnight so there was the chance that the college would be closed today. No such luck. It's cold but there wasn't any snow or ice that I saw. Apparently yesterday the tempurature dropped a lot throughout the day. People kept mentioning how cold it was getting to me and it made me realize that I hadn't been outside at all that day. I went to work at 8am and since we had our monthly book club meeting in the library that day, I had my lunch in the library. Then directly after work was class in the library. I was in the library from 8am-7:30pm. Nearly 12 hours. Today I'm eating outside of the library and I get off work at 5 and then go to Mighty Joe's to work at 6 (at least I'm out of the library).
So something that me and Matt have started to do is swimming. In the morning. At 6:30am. Ew. We're going to start going every Tuesday and Thursday (the only days the pool is open that early) and swim for about 45 minutes before work. We did it this week and it wasn't too bad. The early part wasn't much fun but the swimming was good. The 45 minutes go by pretty fast. However, the pool's locker rooms are not so great. The shower has so much pressure that it feels like needles especially when it gets the backs of my hands. It hurts so much! Plus I'm always really hot after swimming and so when I blow dry my hair, I get all sweaty again... but I end up getting to work on time and looking pretty normal. I've started to bring a yogurt cup along with my usual breakfast (granola bar) on the swimming mornings. It's not enough. I'm absolutly starving after I eat both of those things. It feels like a weight on my whole body, I'm so hungry (and tired/grumpy). Apparently swimming burns more calories that I thought. So I'm going to start bringing more food... maybe oatmeal? Something that will fill me up! Because my whole morning is a waste when I feel like that. Even though it's not perfect, I think that the swimming will be a good thing for me and Matt. I've gotten so out of shape! I really need to start exercising again. I had been running daily over the summer but Matt rarely joined me and I stopped once school started back up. I'm really hoping we can keep this up!
So now that I'm done with that class, I'm going to finish preparing for my study! I have to go into an elementary school and implement literature circles in the classroom and measure their improvement. I'm getting really nervous about this! I'm starting my study on January 28th and I made a list yesterday of all the things I still need to do.... it was a lot longer than I thought it was going to be.... Plus I'm just nervous in general because if I do something wrong during the study it's really hard to fix it! Most of the data will be collected on a day to day basis so if I miss a day, that messes everything up... Plus I'm worried that I won't get as much student participation as I want/need. I'm ready for this study to be over with and it will be on January 12th- that's my last day in the classroom. After that, all I need to do is gather and examine all the data that I got during those 10 days (and put that in my thesis) and then discuss and conclude in my thesis as well. I can do that. Plus I have a class next semester every Wednesday night: Reading in the Content Areas. I technically have a second class next semester as well (it's my thesis class) but we're only meeting 4 times, twice in February and twice in April. So I don't think I'm really going to count that as a "class".
So yesterday there was the threat of snow and/or black ice overnight so there was the chance that the college would be closed today. No such luck. It's cold but there wasn't any snow or ice that I saw. Apparently yesterday the tempurature dropped a lot throughout the day. People kept mentioning how cold it was getting to me and it made me realize that I hadn't been outside at all that day. I went to work at 8am and since we had our monthly book club meeting in the library that day, I had my lunch in the library. Then directly after work was class in the library. I was in the library from 8am-7:30pm. Nearly 12 hours. Today I'm eating outside of the library and I get off work at 5 and then go to Mighty Joe's to work at 6 (at least I'm out of the library).
So something that me and Matt have started to do is swimming. In the morning. At 6:30am. Ew. We're going to start going every Tuesday and Thursday (the only days the pool is open that early) and swim for about 45 minutes before work. We did it this week and it wasn't too bad. The early part wasn't much fun but the swimming was good. The 45 minutes go by pretty fast. However, the pool's locker rooms are not so great. The shower has so much pressure that it feels like needles especially when it gets the backs of my hands. It hurts so much! Plus I'm always really hot after swimming and so when I blow dry my hair, I get all sweaty again... but I end up getting to work on time and looking pretty normal. I've started to bring a yogurt cup along with my usual breakfast (granola bar) on the swimming mornings. It's not enough. I'm absolutly starving after I eat both of those things. It feels like a weight on my whole body, I'm so hungry (and tired/grumpy). Apparently swimming burns more calories that I thought. So I'm going to start bringing more food... maybe oatmeal? Something that will fill me up! Because my whole morning is a waste when I feel like that. Even though it's not perfect, I think that the swimming will be a good thing for me and Matt. I've gotten so out of shape! I really need to start exercising again. I had been running daily over the summer but Matt rarely joined me and I stopped once school started back up. I'm really hoping we can keep this up!
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
New Year!
Sorry I haven't posted in forever! I've been so busy! And I kind of just turned off my brain during Winter Break. Right now I'm finishing up my Jan Term class--for those of you who don't go to LaGrange College, that's the one class that you take in January. It's only a month long and usually relaxing and outside your major. I'm taking the Education of Culturally Diverse Students. This was a required class mainly about learning how to keep in mind that your students lives are very different from yours. It focuses mostly on child poverty. The nice thing though is that this is one of the 'hybrid' courses that the college is trying out. That means that we only meet a few times (4) and the rest of our work is reading the textbooks and posting on the classes blog, usually answering prompts from the teacher. We have had 2 guest speakers too which were really good. One was a professor that used to work at LaGrange College, he talked about the difficulties that hispanic/latino students sometimes face when trying to adjust to living in the United States. The other speaker was a police officer from LaGrange and he talked about some things that his police officers have dealt with and got us to think about how those things affect the children in the area. We have class again tonight with another guest speaker so I'm looking forward to that. The other thing that I finished today was my contextual factors paper! I had to do one of these in my undergraduate and I didn't really know what I was supposed to write about. This time we were given 3 questions to answer throughout the paper which helped guide what I was writing about. We'll see how that turns out.... Now, all I have left to do for this course is write my chapters 3.5 and 3.6 of my thesis! YES. I'm writing a thesis... can't even believe it myself. Apparently chapter 3.5 is very formulaic but I'm still not looking forward to it... I have to talk about Validity, Reliability, Dependability, and Bias... what a mouthful! and no, they don't all mean the same thing.... they're all different. How, you might ask? Not sure exactly.... I'm working on it! I think we're learning about how to write chapter 3.6 today in class.
So for those of you that don't know, I've been working at the LaGrange College Library as a Technology Graduate Assistant. It's not a hard job but I do have to work 25 hours a week. So I've been doing that since June 2012. But I got some great news recently! I got a job at Mighty Joe's Pizza! I've been wanting to get a second job because I'm trying to save up for Peru and my library job just wasn't cutting it. So I'm now a server and cashier for Mighty Joe's! I work Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights from 6pm-10/10:30. I actually had my first day last Saturday and I really enjoyed it! Except for the sweeping... but I got $11 in tips so YAY! I've never worked in a resturant before so this is a completly new experience for me but I like it so far!
So more about my Peru saving situation. I am nearly done with all of those silly calendars. I've gotten a little sick of looking at those things. I have 4 people that still need to pick up and pay for their calendars. Other than that I'm done with it! I haven't totaled my money completly yet; I'm trying to wait until I get rid of all of them. Right now though it's looking like I should have around $400 total but I spent about $200 to get all of those calendars from Chick-fil-a so I really made $200. But that's a lot more than I was expecting! Thanks so much to everyone that bought a calendar! I think it was very successful! I'm planning on doing this again next year too so if you want a calendar for next year, buy it from me!
Just so you guys know, I would have added some pictures to this blog but I'm typing this at the library and we all have new computers and for some reason, they won't let me download pictures onto blogspot. I have to use my coworker's Mac Computer to get pictures on here... which is a hassle... and I can't do it at home because I don't have internet at my house. So it's just going to be a big block of text! Enjoy!
So for those of you that don't know, I've been working at the LaGrange College Library as a Technology Graduate Assistant. It's not a hard job but I do have to work 25 hours a week. So I've been doing that since June 2012. But I got some great news recently! I got a job at Mighty Joe's Pizza! I've been wanting to get a second job because I'm trying to save up for Peru and my library job just wasn't cutting it. So I'm now a server and cashier for Mighty Joe's! I work Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights from 6pm-10/10:30. I actually had my first day last Saturday and I really enjoyed it! Except for the sweeping... but I got $11 in tips so YAY! I've never worked in a resturant before so this is a completly new experience for me but I like it so far!
So more about my Peru saving situation. I am nearly done with all of those silly calendars. I've gotten a little sick of looking at those things. I have 4 people that still need to pick up and pay for their calendars. Other than that I'm done with it! I haven't totaled my money completly yet; I'm trying to wait until I get rid of all of them. Right now though it's looking like I should have around $400 total but I spent about $200 to get all of those calendars from Chick-fil-a so I really made $200. But that's a lot more than I was expecting! Thanks so much to everyone that bought a calendar! I think it was very successful! I'm planning on doing this again next year too so if you want a calendar for next year, buy it from me!
Just so you guys know, I would have added some pictures to this blog but I'm typing this at the library and we all have new computers and for some reason, they won't let me download pictures onto blogspot. I have to use my coworker's Mac Computer to get pictures on here... which is a hassle... and I can't do it at home because I don't have internet at my house. So it's just going to be a big block of text! Enjoy!
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