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Listening to:     Some classic southern rock

Listening to archive

Increase Your Awareness - Ehlers Danlos Syndrome

A link to my Blog

My Plan for this Class

If this class is anything like the last class I took with Dr. Conner, and so far it looks promising, then I will be expected to produce a large quantity of highly polished, self-generated writing.  It's the self-generated part that scared the pants off me last time and excites me this time.  I've gone from "No one is going to tell me what to write?" to "No one is going to tell me what to write! Woo hoo!"  So, what will I write?

Goal #1

I wrote a piece for my summer session Nature Writing class of which I am quite proud. At the request of my professor, it was a grand departure from my usual style of third-person, academic writing. My style is, more often than not, highly analytical and completely non-personal.  This particular paper, however, blended narrative with academic writing. It is intensely personal and the only essay that has ever actually induced me to shed tears while writing. The professor gave me an A+ and encouraged me to work further on it for publication. That is goal #1 for me this semester - work further on this essay and get it published.

Goal #2 

I began my college career (and I do mean career at this point!) in 1994 at the University of Central Florida when we still turned in hand-written papers, the internet was rather new and we all carried pagers, not cell phones.  That was the year digital satellite tv was launched, Forrest Gump was released, Kurt Cobain was buried and Doom was the hottest video game out there. (Man, I kicked butt at that. I got the BFG every time!) Needless to say, things have changed since then. One thing that has not seemed to change, is that I am still in school. I have taken two or three classes at a time with no more than an 18 month break ever since. I have slowly wound my way through an associate's degree in Business, a bachelor's degree in English Literature, and now I am wrapping up a master's degree in English Education. As exhausting as my college career sounds, it has put me in the unique position of a first-hand observer of many instructor techniques blended with changing and emerging technologies.

This brings me to my second goal for this class, which is to produce a 20-page final paper worthy of doubling as my master's thesis. (Well, one of them, as I must produce a thesis on a topic in education as well as a thesis on a topic in literature.)  Once again, I plan on departing from my usual method of writing and, instead, employing a blend of personal narrative and academics to explore the unique method of teaching that Dr. Conner offers.