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Updates to «College, 2008» section.

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Kenneth John Odle 2023-11-16 20:01:28 -05:00
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@ -166,7 +166,29 @@ You can just skip over all the diversions in here if you want. It's just how my
\section{College, 2008}
Bush II decided to tank the economy for ordinary people so that rich people could get richer.\footnote{This is the second of three "once in a lifetime" recessions I have lived through. Yay, capitalism!} I decided to go back into teaching (which, thanks to current conservative political policies\footnote{Along with the asshole behavior of parents who approve of those policies.} there will always be a demand for), which meant I needed to go back to college to renew my teaching license. But this is a whole other story for which I have run out of space, so it will have to go in a future issue.
Bush II decided to tank the economy for ordinary people so that rich people could get richer.\footnote{This is the second of three "once in a lifetime" recessions I have lived through. Yay, capitalism! The rich get richer and everyone else gets poorer.} I decided to go back into teaching (which, thanks to current conservative political policies\footnote{Along with the asshole behavior of parents who approve of those policies.} there will always be a demand for), which meant I needed to go back to college to renew my teaching license. But this is a whole other story for which I have run out of space (not to mention it has very little to do with Linux or even computers), so it will have to go in a different zine if I ever decide to write it down.
What I can say is that the first time around, I wanted to get a biology major and an English minor because I wanted to teach biology and English, and I thought (naively) that this was how things worked.\footnote{They don't. Who knew?} But my biology advisor, a man who was many decades if not centuries my senior, advised against that plan. He felt that it would make me unhireable because it would look like I could not make up my mind between biology and English.
I did not realize it at the time,\footnote{I may not have realized it until just \textit{now}, when I wrote this.} but he was revealing his prejudice as a Biology professor. He was wrong, ultimately (schools absolutely love it when you can teach more than one subject as it provides for a lot of flexibility in scheduling), but his argument scared me. I was going to go thousands of dollars in debt for this degree (I was not smart enough to get a full scholarship, so I had to make up the difference with grants and loans—lots and lots of loans), and if I couldn't get a job, I wouldn't be able to pay back those loans. I would be sentenced to a life of penury, which is the very thing a college degree was supposed to protect against. So I agreed with him and forgot about getting an English minor.
His second argument was that as a prospective biology teacher, I was \textit{required} to get a group science ``minor'', which is in quotation marks because it was actually 36 credit hours, which was the equivalent of a major, rather than the 20 credit hours typical of an actual minor. As a result, I would have little time or energy (or money!) for another minor.
So in 2008 I decided to go back to teaching. To do so, I needed to get eight credit hours in ``a teachable subject'' so I decided to take a couple of English classes, as that would both meet the legal requirements and also give me a chance to read and write for credit.
As they say, things happened.
At first I was taking a couple of English classes. But then I thought, that's eight credit hours. If I take three more I could actually get the full minor. Why not? So a couple of English classes became an English minor, which eventually became an English major.
Becoming a biology teacher required that I take a \textit{methods} class, which is a class about…well, basically it's a class about how to \textit{be} a biology teacher. It teaches you how to plan labs and field trips, and how to do things in a safe way so that nobody gets hurt, and covers the specifics of teaching biology that were not covered in your regular education classes.
Becoming an English teacher required that I take \textit{two} methods classes: one about teaching literature and one about teaching writing. I remember very little about either class. (And to be honest, I remember more about the graduate class I took in fairy and folk tales, because those tales evolve like living beings—which in a way they are. This was where biology and literature overlapped for me in the Venn diagram of my life.)
The one thing I remember very distinctly about the writing methods course was that our capstone project had to be \textit{online}. Oh wow, I thought—I've been creating websites for a while now. But I was worried. I had been hearing about how young people were so good with technology, so comfortable with it, that I was sure whatever I came up with would just blow my feeble old school attempts out of the water.
I could not have been more wrong.
\section{Today}