Homoskedastic

So I’m reading the syllabus for my class on Monday…

Here’s the grade breakdown:
One in-class exam: 50%
Research proposal: 50%
IRB certification: required to pass the class

Also, I just added it up, and I have ~360 pages of various articles and book excerpts to read by Monday.

Goodbye, world.

These are the classes I am taking this semester.

I giggled like a child. I do not belong in graduate school.

Writing this from Nashville!

You all should visit. But not yet…all I have is a bed and a table.

Vanderbilt stuff next week. Whew.

positivelypersistentteach asked: LATE TDD: Where are you going next?

Yeah…I should probably answer that for people. My posts about my students have sort of been inexplicably sad.

Anyway, I’m starting my PhD program at Vanderbilt University in a month. It’s a program in international education, so I’m hoping to still stay within the education community.

I have a lot of feelings about leaving the school. Really, if I didn’t have this as an option, I would completely want to stay. It was hard trying to explain to my kids that I’m not leaving because I don’t like doing my job. 

I’m going to do this because if anything, this job opened up a lot of floodgates in my head, questions without answers and a real drive to seek them out.

So also, I sort of feel the need to preemptively defend myself here because I am reminding myself of the more common arguments against TFA (of which I am not a part).

So some points of clarification that I don’t think have been all that clear during my time swimming through the #education community:

• I am not a certified teacher. Nor was I in a teacher training program. I am an AmeriCorps VISTA. If you don’t know what we are, the main purpose of VISTAs is to build the capacity of organizations to accomplish some goal. This is a year-long position, so I would have had to make some major change at the end of this year anyway.
• The nature of my program and position, however, required that I teach two sections. But these are not district-approved courses. At best, I would label them as extracurricular activities that operated during the school day. This high school’s structure is such that this did not take away from my students’ time in other courses.
• I considered going for a teaching residency program after this year. I really did. I even bought materials to help prepare for the PRAXIS (I was hoping to teach math). And honestly, to this day, I still think about it. But this opportunity came along (it’s a fully funded program), and it was simply too good to pass up.
• I know this sounds superhero complex-like, but I assure you that it’s not meant to be: I want to do something about education. As rewarding as teaching might be, I have always had a greater interest and passion for working with broader systems in education. That’s why I’m going for this PhD program.

Sorry if that was unnecessary. I just registered for classes less than a half-hour ago and the emotions are eating through my corpus callosum at the moment.

Oh holy crap, I move in a month.

Nashville Tumblr people should hit me up.

Apartments in Nashville, anyone?

Anyone from around Nashville with any tips on good places to live in Nashville, or things I should be looking for? 

Looking for things relatively near the Vanderbilt campus.