Some Background

So my name is Christine and I just recently graduated from Ithaca College (Spring 2011) with a Bachelors Degree in Math. I knew that I wanted to be a math teacher all of my life, but I didn't realize what hard work that would take. I have never been one of those extremely smart people who get everything the first time they see it, so as you could imagine I was one of those annoying students who would ask a million questions and if I was to scared to ask them to the teacher I would ask my classmates. I was lucky enough to have GREAT friends in my major who helped me get through my Bachelors Degree with a pretty nice GPA. Without them I would not be where I am so I would like to thank them for all of their help. But then I decided that I wanted to go right into graduate school to move on towards getting a career as soon as possible. Ithaca College has a 13 month intensive program to earn a masters degree in Teacher which is exactly what I thought I wanted to do.

I started off the program thinking that I could get through anything if I got through my Math Degree, but I never thought that school could be as fast paced as this summer semester has been. I graduated on May 22nd and I started school by May 31st. From the first day until now (4 weeks later) I have barely even had time to take a shower and eat dinner at night. I am taking a math course and a practice & pedagogy course. The math course has been working me to the bone and the other course is something I really enjoy even though it is a lot of work. I had to do two lessons in my pedagogy class so far. Last weeks was cooperative learning, and this weeks was "direct instruction." My first lesson went almost seamless, at least the part I did (because it was a group lesson). Today, though, was the "direct instruction" lesson and that definitely had some problems! I moved way to quickly through the material and I finished way to early so I had to improvise. I asked a student to come up to the board and do the next problem, which was problem #3 and easy, however he decided to do the Bonus on the board which was a lot more difficult, and he didn't do it correctly. Right as he went up to the board and did it wrong, my teacher walked in and gave me a death stare as to way CHRISTINE YOU DID A TERRIBLE JOB! I thought this was unfair because she missed all of my lesson that was perfect, and walked in as it fell apart. She is a very intimidating woman so I am nervous to hear her feedback!

My teacher keeps telling us to make sure we stay "burned in" (the opposite of "burned out"--because we read a book on it in the beginning of the semester) and she tells us that one way to make sure that happens is to "have a life" and I am having an EXTREMELY hard time finding the balance between having a life and being successful in classes. For example, I finally decided to go home for fathers day and my sisters graduation (from high school) party this past weekend, and because of that I didnt have time to do my lesson plan for "direct instruction" until yesterday (day before the lesson) and I cant help but think that if I had stayed home and worked on it over the weekend it would have went perfect like my last one did.

Some days I think that I am not going to make it! All I keep being told is how much this is going to pay off, but between the stress and the $55,000 loan I took out on top of my $25,000 loan from undergraduate school I DON'T KNOW HOW MUCH MORE I CAN TAKE OF THIS!

So I hope that this can be a place where I can be honest with myself about this process they call Grad School, and hopefully I can help and hear from others who are going through or hope to go through this process in the near future!--I am bluntly honest and extremely sarcastic, so I hope to put a realistic and humorous spin on this journey as I write.