1234, can I have a little more?
1. I've been living with my family for over a week now. It's exactly what I expected: equally irritating and comforting. It's been pretty awesome being here with my favorite cousin Mike, but I think it won't take long before I remember why I couldn't stand him for sixteen years. And there will be a test: He wants to know if I want to share an apartment with him and his girlfriend. Original plans were for them to move to South Carolina where he will begin attending the fire academy, but they've decided to put that off for a year while she finishes her Associate's Degree. I'd much rather live with them than here (I think), but the whole point of moving here was to not have to worry about paying rent for a while. I have not made up my mind, but every time I'm asked about it, I speak as though I'm nearly certain I will live with them. If I could spare $400/month with the kind of schedule I was hoping on keeping through grad school, I could have just stayed in Gainesville. I need to make up my mind soon.
2. I'm taking three courses this semester. My only Tuesday class, Syntax, is also the course I've been most afraid of. The professor is named Dr. Thompson, which, incidentally, was also the name of the professor who taught my undergrad English Structure course, which inexplicably contained very little in the way of syntax. Or education, really. Ellen seems to be less abrasive than Roger, with lectures that seem more insightful and relevant. I spent the last few weeks picturing this first day of class with me staring helplessly at a blank notebook as the professor rambled on and on about Chomskian generative grammar leaving me lost and confused as the rest of the class joined in a lively discussion of theoretical syntax and showing how unprepared for the class I really was.
Instead, Dr. Thompson started the class in the same way that almost all of my Linguistics classes have started -- by asking us to fill out index cards with our language backgrounds and asking us to define the word in the title of the course. "Who can define Syntax for me?" Followed, as always, by a long silence as someone nervously admits that it feels like a trick question. The discussion never delved into unfamiliar territory, and nothing I worked up the nerve to say was terribly stupid. (In total: "Not necessarily. What about passive construction?" and "Because that's a copula!") I'm not afraid of this class anymore.
Today will be ESOL Curriculum, a class I signed up for mostly because it's on the Broward Campus. I'm not nervous about it, and it is a required course for the TESL certificate I'm planning on receiving, but it's so far removed from what I'm trying to get into that I wonder why I should bother. Developing a K-12 curriculum for nonnative students? It's a class about how to teach science or whatever to kids who can't speak English so well. I want to teach neither kids nor science or whatever.
Thursday will be History of the English Language, which I've already taken two undergrad classes in, so I think I'm prepared for that.
3. OH MY GOD THE GATORS ARE THE BEST TEAM IN THE WORLD.
