Three Down, One to Go.

Just today I received notification for the last of the letter grades and credits of my summer graduate course work. Straight "A"s. I'm so proud I made the notification my profile picture at my social website. Ahhh. It feels so good to be done with that. Now I can kinda reap the benefits of the work: a financial boost up the pay scale and a greater feeling of job security since I've earned the CLAD certificate. Well, most of it. I've only got one more class to finish before I can say I'm done. That starts in October and ends in December. Then I'll really be finished with the superfluous course work.
I remember when I started in the summer I was not enthralled to be there. I was sacrificing the earnings I could have made teaching summer school and sacrificing the summer time I would have had for vacation. Either way, this was work for work's sake, and it was going to cost me a pretty penny in tuition. On top of that resolve, I found out that the off campus location for this course was going to be in Carson. CARSON! If you've never been to Carson, let me assure you that you aren't missing much. It's a pretty run-down industrial suburb, north by northwest of Long Beach. Far enough inland to be boring, and close enough to Terminal Island to be commercially depressing.
It was fifty miles from my home, and if you know me, you know how I dread any commute that takes more than twenty minutes. These classes were going to be in Carson (still feeling my stomach groan at mere mention of the town), five days a week, starting at five o'clock. It was the perfect time for summer rush hour. I decided to take the subway trains and a bus just to save my nerves, the wear and tear on my car, and the gas money. Sure it took me two and half hours, but I could still read, study, or sleep on my ride. Little did I realize the exciting entertainment venues that were offered on the wild public transportation we call "the subway". I saw gambling, pole dancing, and one time I was witness to a knife fight that started at the platform on West Washington and continued onto the train and the platform for Vernon. Fun times. Still, it was better than a hot drive in July. At night a classmate friend asked me to drive with her back to L.A. so that saved me half the time on the way back.
The course work was intense, but after a while I got used to it being a heavy load for a condensed course. Still, while I could pace myself at home and break up the projects or the long reading, at the class it was five hours of perpetual sitting. Even if there was a motivated begining at five o'clock, it usually died in the first two hours. There was just no way the classload of fifty-something professional adults could sit-out the whole time without showing signs of boredom. Though most of us did manage to suppress it well, I'll confess that there were plenty of times I would bring one of the texts from the other class so I could silently begin the other assignment in my lap under the table, or text any number of friends I needed to respond to (still done under the table and out of sight) or pass notes to a classmate next to me. We tried to stay respectful, but who plans on keeping us for five hours beating the same dead subject we've all read, learned, and professed our knowledge over, day after day after day? I remember I wrote this blog entry earlier this month when I was finishing the last of the elaborate final projects:

What seemed like for ever is finally over. I've just completed the last project for the last class of my Crosscultural Language and Academic Development certificate (CLAD). Well, almost "last class". Certainly the last class of this summer. Lemmie tell ya, it wasn't easy. I can't say that the courses were an academic challenge. In fact, they seemed pretty easy considering the courses I took when I was an undergrad English Lit major. The challenge of these courses was finding the time to write all the minutia that was required of the assignments; and the reading, oeuf! I've read texts that were poorly written. These were just dry and long-winded without practical application to any current public school I've ever taught at in the last fifteen years. Seriously, while every one of us graduates was already a teacher it was difficult to read a text that tells us the ideal setting and approach to teaching, starting with a classroom of no more than twenty students. "Twenty students"? I'm sorry, but I'm in Los Angeles, California. Where is there a public school room assigned only twenty students? The current level is usually closer to thirty-seven or forty, and at that cramped capacity it is all one can do to get any meaningful instruction done. Still, we endure.

Almost a month since I had to be in that boring repressive room in Carson, and all fifty train trips to and fro, all that writing and all that reading, after all that I can say that as much as I felt the torture of it all, I do have the relief, the hard earned "A"s and some sense of esteem from it being finished.