The clinical instructor who has a reputation of making each of her students cry at least once during the semester, and I think she tried doing that rite-of-passage thing with me the other night, when she was giving me feedback and she said that my client had lost all the progress she had made in speech therapy over the summer. Subtext: You made her worse. My gut sank and I felt really despondent and I wanted to die, but I did not cry. Not because I am “strong” or can take criticism but rather because this teaching thing isn’t really about me or my hurt feelings. This clinical therapeutic teaching is about problem-solving, and so when I get a gutshot comment like that I need to think about the problems: Why has my client apparently “lost progress”? And is it really “progress” if it goes away after one month? (Nope.)
"Sometimes I think that the environment [in graduate school] changes how you view yourself to the point that you think passing quals/fields/etc. is the true measure of your self-worth when in fact it is actually quite meaningless. For example, passing quals does nothing to improve your ability to serve the community, be a good family member or friend, etc.; if anything, it may impair those qualities."
— One of Mary’s grad school friends on the phd qualifiers and, um, life in general.
Even though I am all graduated, I have to go back to school for one semester. I originally enrolled at UW-Eau Claire, which is a teacher/nurse/engineer-mill commutable from my parents’ house. But they have a six-credit limit for “special” students, so I’m going back to Madison. I’ve arranged off-campus living with my generous older brother and his generous partner.
As a special student at Madison, I can take up 18 credits but my enrollment date is 48 hours before instruction begins, meaning that I need to gather up 12 credits from the slimmest pickings. My strategy is too land a bunch of computer science and math courses and maybe some communicative disorders, but at this point, the six-credit intro course in Japanese is looking mighty tempting. Experience in a tone (even pitch-accent) and SOV language is very relevant experience for a budding theoretical phonologist.
But it doesn’t really matter what I take because (a) I will do fine and (b) the real goal of the semester is for me to apply and get into one of the better midwestern linguistics programs, if not one of the big-name coastal schools. Thus, I must brush up on and return to being totally conversant in theoretical phonology and articulatory phonetics. I also need to do the stinking GRE and kick its ass, as well as develop my writing samples and reconnect with potential letter of recommendation writers. That’s the real work for the fall.
The upside of the new location is that Mary will be in Chicago this fall instead of Columbus, which is the difference between catching an early-morning bus and budgeting/planning flights two months in advance. That is to say, things will be much more awesome.
I bought a knock-off moleskine graph paper journal with the goal of condensing my phonology, advanced phonology and morphology notes into one handy place. Such an activity will serve as a refresher for grad school (APPLICATIONS DUE IN FOUR MONTHS).
But last night, as I was going through all of my old class stuff, I could not find the folder! This is the most important folder from school. It contains two notebooks, both tattered and in pieces from use and reference, and two embedded folder with stray papers, handouts, example problems, exams, exam review notes, and sheets of dead-ended brainstorming for my semester thesis on Optimality Theory. In short, it has everything. I was on the cusp of a genuine anxiety attack—what if I incidentally, naively wrote some random thought down which if reappreciated could be the innovative insight of my academic career! the ruin!!!—but the universe proved to be fair and I found it. That spasm of panic has given an important incentive to condense my notes beyond mere review: I need to back that shit up.
