A Little Something Strange

Hey strange people! Guess what?!?!?! It's the first time I'm going to do something on this blog today! Can you guess what it is? If you're one of those people who like to skip ahead or read the end of things before you read the beginning (no, I'm not talking about you, Mom, not at all), you may already know the answer to this strange mystery. But if you're a normal-ish person who reads things in chronological order as determined by our culture, because other cultures have different ways of linguistically representing time in writing, you will still be confused by my strange rambling. Everything is so strange. But your patience may be rewarded, depending on how you think about rewards.

Anyway. First order of business: Life update. I have a lot of classes right now and lots of them involve writing lesson plans. And those of you who have been around since last year will recognize that pattern that begins to evolve around this time of the year that means I'm using this blog to procrastinate on real work. The fun part of classes though, is that I get to write lesson plans in Spanish, because Spanish is great! Except, my education teachers don't really speak Spanish, so that means I basically have to write all my lesson plans twice, because I have to translate them into English so my strange teachers can actually understand what I'm doing. It's kind of frustrating.

One of my lessons is a reading lesson about a short story in which a poor man finds a bag of gold in the forest and the rich man claims the poor man stole from the bag of gold and then the king turns them into parrots and cooks them over a fire (only parts of that summary are true, but I'm not going to tell you which parts).

The other lesson is on a bigger scale, and involves actually planning a whole unit about actual things and it's terrifying and so much work and I'm dying. But not really. Just a little bit. It's hard to figure out ways to make informal commands interesting to 9th graders who don't love grammar like I do.

The other two education classes are like death, and I don't want to start with them because then I'll have to rant about them and possibly bore/offend you. Which would be bad.

OKAY I'LL START WITH THEM. YOU'VE CONVINCED ME.

First of all, educational psychology, you are so scary and actually, no I changed my mind I don't really want to complain about you because literally we haven't learned anything important, because the teacher used to teach third grade and still kind of treats us like third graders. We spent 45 minutes watching her take notes as a demonstration on good note taking. I think that if we've gotten this far in our educational processes, we've probably already learned an effective way to take notes for ourselves, BUT I GUESS NOT BECAUSE WE'RE THIRD GRADERS. Sorry, I forgot how old I was for a second.

Also, TIME FOR THE SURPRISE! I was so annoyed I doodled this picture in my textbook.

This is an image of a monster with people coming to stare at him, because he looks weird, and that's what our culture does when it encounters something it doesn't understand. 

It was an act of rebellion again everything that is happening in that class. Also, it's probably an accurate depiction of one of my roommates. I won't tell you which. You'll have to decide. Maybe you can even vote, if you feel so inclined.

Second of all, diverse and exceptional learner is even worse because the professor is vaguely (and did I mention that this is a class about diversity?) racist, sexist, homophobic, and able-ist. Which I'm pretty sure is not a good way to be if you're suppose to teach future teachers how to not be those things. But I'm just a lowly student. I know nothing.

Which is apparently what my professors think we students really do know: nothing. Like, why are we learning how to take notes? Why did you GRADE OUR NOTES like we're 8? Why do we work in groups to do nothing? Why do we debate theories that are actually basically the same thing, and should not really be compared to each other in terms of differentiation? I don't really have answers to this because I know nothing. Right.

So, all this complaining is probably getting a little tiresome, but I just wanted you to have a little background for the thing that I'm going to tell you now.

And that thing is: I've decided to switch my major!

And all you people who have known me for more than like three years for sure know that this is a huge decision because I've always wanted to be a teacher and that's all I've thought about for forever and changing is a major life decision that led to quite a few life crises during the past few months. But now that I've decided, I'm actually super, duper, really really excited!

I'm going to be majoring in Spanish (so don't worry, I haven't entirely changed everything about my basic personality) and international studies. I'm really excited to start studying cultures and all the things that entails. Plus, SPANISH IS GREAT, HAVE I MENTIONED HOW MUCH I LOVE IT?

And I don't want you to think that I'm just changing my major to not education because these education classes are horrible or too hard or something, because that's not true. Certainly, they are frustrating, but I've just kind of had a feeling that education isn't something that I should be doing right now at this point in my life, and I've had this feeling for a while (a couple months, at least). It's weird to see something that you were once so passionate about slowly slip away from you and become something strange and unfamiliar, and it's a little bit sad. But I think that for a while, I was starting to feel like being a teacher was a duty that I had taken on, something I had to fulfill, like a promise to someone else, instead of a calling that this was what I wanted to do with my life.

And as someone who has spent many years in a classroom, I don't want to inflict duty and apathy on students who deserve passion and excitement.

Also, I would like to point out that I still really, really value education, and that I think it's important to consider the ways in which our educational system could be fixed or changed or manipulated to fit our students better, and that I want to make sure everyone has access to the best education that they can possibly find, and I want to emphasize the excitement that I get from learning. I just don't really want to be in the middle of it anymore.

WHICH IS SO WEIRD AND DIFFICULT.

But I am really excited about international studies and Spanish and I'm ready to move on with my education, even if it's in a different direction than I initially planned. Even if it's in a different direction than my six-year-old brain planned as I made my brothers be my students before they could even speak (and also before they could even sit up without help, probably. Sorry, Matt and Packy.)

And that is why this post is so strange. It's because everything is so strange, and through this strangeness, I've learned that things aren't always set in stone, even if your mind is made up. Because sometimes your mind doesn't really know what your heart wants. Brains are really good at thinking and reasoning through problems, but they're not so good at feeling the emotions behind problems. And that's why sometimes, I think, it's probably okay to let your heart do some decision making. Not all the time, because hearts are pretty sneaky and will stab you in the back with the knife of betrayal if you let them think too much. But sometimes, sometimes it's okay.



PS: Okay, so I didn't know that when I posted this on Facebook, it would display the picture of the surprise instead of the picture it usually puts there, so if you want to complain about the lack of surprise, please contact Facebook. Sorry.