A lot of the kids and counselors at the camp would ask, at the end of every summer, 'are you going to be back next year?' Even at the very beginning of the summer people would ask everyone what their plans were for the following year. Because the camp season only lasts somewhere around eight weeks, I suspect people just want to know that next year will be a continuation of this year just as this year flowed on from the last and the same familiar faces have returned to do it all over again. My answer to that question was, invariably, that I would try to put off growing up for another year and make it one more time. But I couldn't really say that this time. Instead, I said that I wanted to but didn't think that I'd be able to put off growing up any longer. As much as I loved the camp experience I just couldn't hang around at home doing odd jobs for eight or ten months waiting for the next summer to roll around.
So I returned home in October and applied for a couple of education courses. With my earlier studies already under my belt -- as more-or-less useless as that degree was in the real world -- I just had to do a one-year graduate diploma in order to qualify as a teacher. In all honesty, the fact that the course was so brief was one of the biggest reasons I was giving it so much consideration. The thought of going back to uni terrified me as I didn't think I'd be able to make a go of it. I'd been out of the system for about six or seven years. At least if it was only a year I could see the light at the end of the tunnel right from the start. And even if I hated it I could suffer through a year. I hoped.
Early in the new year I received my acceptance letter and a short time after that I signed up for my classes. As the orientation date approached I became more nervous, more anxious, and more genuinely sure that I was making a huge mistake. I could, quite vividly, remember how I felt in the final semester of my undergraduate studies. Sick. Nauseous. Dizzy with anxiety. The thought of being paralysed by feeling inadequate, inept and incapable of anything made me exceptionally apprehensive about going back to school and wonder what ever made me think it would be a good idea.
If anything, it was my stubbornness that saved me. I just don't let myself quit that easily. Even if I want to. Especially if I want to. I don't know whether I like to make myself suffer in order to punish myself or whether I know that, ultimately, whatever lies ahead of me will benefit me in the long run but once I've signed myself up for something, there really is no going back. And so it was with this. Attending the orientation didn't help. Actually, it made me feel worse. While the academic and administrative staff seemed friendly, they went on and on about how much work the course involved. 'Intensive' is how they all described it, going on to make jokes about how we will all now be occupied during the previously 'unharnessed' time between the hours of midnight and two AM. While I'm not afraid of hard work, I was afraid of being immediately swamped with mountains of work I was incapable of doing. And that was my mindset right from the outset, that I would be incapable of the work. This was, after all, postgraduate study now and it would be far harder than everything I had done up to that point. And I was lucky to even get through the undergrad stuff. I envisaged thousands of pages of reading, endless hours of lectures filled with the driest theoretical concepts that in no way related to the practical considerations of day-to-day teaching, and writing endless essays requiring hundreds of pedantically formatted references where stray commas and semi-colons were punishable by death. And that was before the practical component of the course even came into it. Yes, I was certainly not looking forward to being thrown in the deep end because I was almost certain that I would drown.
As is probably true in most instances when I've felt like this, I really needn't have been concerned. Although the word 'intensive' had been bandied about with wild abandon during the orientation -- and continued to be overused for weeks and months to come -- this was not my experience. While I wouldn't say it was easy, it certainly wasn't hard. Academically, not that much was expected at all. Few essays, few exams. There weren't even that many contact hours. And because the semester was split between classes and practicum, the first semester classes wrapped up inside of the first two months.
During that time I had done the fairly insignificant amount of reading required by the classes I was taking (even though half of the cohort really didn't seem to care that much about such trivialities) which, curiously, I felt didn't really benefit me a great deal. For instance, after weeks of classes for one particular subject which 'required' a hundred-ish dollar textbook we hadn't even cracked open yet, one of my fellow students asked the lecturer whether there was anything specific we needed to know from the text in order to prepare for the exam. The response: 'No, just read the text book.' Were there any particular parts of the book we should look at? We asked for clarification. 'No, just read the text book.' Perhaps it was that the text book had not even been mentioned in the six or so weeks leading up to this moment that puzzled me so much. Or that, apparently, no particular parts of the book were any more or less relevant to what we were doing -- we just needed to know the whole lot. It could have been that we only learned this rather important information fairly incidentally by asking as we were walking out of the final tutorial prior to the exam. Or it could have been the irony of this happening within a compulsory class supposedly designed to teach us how to be competent educators. In any event, this both amused and annoyed me. I subsequently read the whole book (it was only a couple of hundred pages) and took copious notes which were pretty much irrelevant to the content of the exam. Said exam, again in a rather curious turn of events, seemed only tangentially related to the content of the lectures and tutorials I had diligently attended throughout the semester. But, by that point, I probably shouldn't have been surprised.
The important thing was that I had made it through the first semester of classes and was fairly confident that I had at least passed. I had shown myself that I could do it. Surely I would, therefore, be the poster child of confidence in all facets of my life from that moment on? That's probably overstating it. Just a bit. And besides, that's not my style. Anyway, the coursework was only the first half of the first semester. Still awaiting me was six weeks of practicum at a high school where I was to apply my newly-acquired knowledge of the way the education system functions.
As is probably true in most instances when I've felt like this, I really needn't have been concerned. Although the word 'intensive' had been bandied about with wild abandon during the orientation -- and continued to be overused for weeks and months to come -- this was not my experience. While I wouldn't say it was easy, it certainly wasn't hard. Academically, not that much was expected at all. Few essays, few exams. There weren't even that many contact hours. And because the semester was split between classes and practicum, the first semester classes wrapped up inside of the first two months.
During that time I had done the fairly insignificant amount of reading required by the classes I was taking (even though half of the cohort really didn't seem to care that much about such trivialities) which, curiously, I felt didn't really benefit me a great deal. For instance, after weeks of classes for one particular subject which 'required' a hundred-ish dollar textbook we hadn't even cracked open yet, one of my fellow students asked the lecturer whether there was anything specific we needed to know from the text in order to prepare for the exam. The response: 'No, just read the text book.' Were there any particular parts of the book we should look at? We asked for clarification. 'No, just read the text book.' Perhaps it was that the text book had not even been mentioned in the six or so weeks leading up to this moment that puzzled me so much. Or that, apparently, no particular parts of the book were any more or less relevant to what we were doing -- we just needed to know the whole lot. It could have been that we only learned this rather important information fairly incidentally by asking as we were walking out of the final tutorial prior to the exam. Or it could have been the irony of this happening within a compulsory class supposedly designed to teach us how to be competent educators. In any event, this both amused and annoyed me. I subsequently read the whole book (it was only a couple of hundred pages) and took copious notes which were pretty much irrelevant to the content of the exam. Said exam, again in a rather curious turn of events, seemed only tangentially related to the content of the lectures and tutorials I had diligently attended throughout the semester. But, by that point, I probably shouldn't have been surprised.
The important thing was that I had made it through the first semester of classes and was fairly confident that I had at least passed. I had shown myself that I could do it. Surely I would, therefore, be the poster child of confidence in all facets of my life from that moment on? That's probably overstating it. Just a bit. And besides, that's not my style. Anyway, the coursework was only the first half of the first semester. Still awaiting me was six weeks of practicum at a high school where I was to apply my newly-acquired knowledge of the way the education system functions.
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