Monday, August 17, 2009

Tarzan's Third Post

Man what a rush this last couple of weeks has been. First Jane and I get back from taking care of Grandpa and started addressing the stockpiled concerns of our lives. I had a job interview at College of the Canyons for an online library instructor position. I honestly have to say I really enjoyed it. Preparing for the interview gave me the chance to reflect on my career to this point and I like what I see. I created a short online demo class and practiced answering hypothetical questions. The interview itself felt very natural. I seemed to have a good rapport with the interviewers and really enjoyed demonstrating what I know. Even if I don't get the job, I'm glad I tried out for it. Though my chances could be better than I had hoped. I talked with one of my character references today and she mentioned that College of the Canyons had gotten in touch with her last week for a character reference about me. So at least I made the first cut.
After the interview, I organized a field trip to the Huntington Library for my Academic Decathlon team. Jane was a big help chaperoning about 8 students around the museum complex. Everything went well and I think they enjoyed themselves while learning something. That evening we drove down South for some wonderful sushi with my mom who had relieved us down at Grandpa's. We had some wonderful sushi and even better conversation at a local sushi restaurant that Jane and I discovered when we were there in July. Good memories.
Then I had to pack my camping stuff because I was going with the young men from the ward to a week long LDS themed Boy Scout summer camp. I have very mixed feeling about how that experience went. I was very impressed by how well my boys did and how hard the stake leadership worked to pull the whole thing off. I was very disappointed to see how poorly the camp was run though and absolutely enraged at some of the ugly things that happened at a camp full of LDS youth. I'd go into more detail here but I keep swearing whenever I think about the details and I know how Jane fells about me using profanity. In short there was good, bad and decidedly ugly at camp. Of course the bishop wants me to speak for 10 minutes about the camp next week in church. It'll be a strain but I will have to sanitize my recollections.
Now I am home which seems very empty without Jane. I miss her much and am happy to call her every day. It helps that I am busy trying to get done as much as I can in the last little bit of my summer that is remaining. So much to do and so little time.
On Sunday I read an article in the LA times about how easy it is to find information about people using the Internet. I decided to Google myself and was pleased that not much stuff came up. I was very surprised to see a link to the site Rate My Teacher. I followed the link here and was floored to see that some students had actually rated and commented about me as a teacher. Its all anonymous and shouldn't be taken too seriously, but the comments posted there really touched me. Someone actually noticed that I'm trying to make a difference. I felt like I was on cloud 9 for the rest of the day.

Whew, I've been busy and very happy to be so.

18 comments:

Jane said...

You are freaking fantastic honey!

Phat Fiddle said...

It goes to show that you really are a fantastic teacher striving to make a difference. At least you didn't have any kids comment about how you broke up their "academic" make-out sessions :)

Rocketgirl said...

I think the kids like you :) I checked out mine a while back and I loved the one comment that said "She's a great teacher as long as you do everything she says." I'll ignore the ones where they said I was crap, except let's face it - those were dead on :) Thanks for lending me your lovely Jane :)

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From Whence You Cometh