Sunday, July 22, 2012

Just Checking In

My first semester is over, and one thing I have learned: life is not going to get any easier for the next 20 months.  The school is not hard except in the most critical area: actual hands on learning of technique. We are given brief verbal instructions, once (sometimes not everyone gets them even) and then expected to perform like professionals. I kept waiting for the written instructions, checklists, visual aides, videos and helpful hints to be offered, in any format.  I finally found out (after flunking the hands on portion of the test) that they never will be offered.  It is expected that everyone who is not finding their own way to learn these skills (i.e. developing their own curriculum) and/or is not in the group who is lucky enough to hear the brief instructions in the first place, they will all be eliminated at the end of the next semester.

That, at this point, looks like it will include me.  BUT, I am now aware that I am waiting in vain for real teaching, and so I will spend my three weeks between semesters doing my best to develop my own curriculum for this skill.  Also, I know better now the level of expertise expected, though it is possible that starting out slow I will always lag behind the curve.  If that turns out to be the case, no worries. I will do my best to transfer to a different medical training school for a similar job.  The other option relies more on academics and scientific acumen, which are my strengths.  But I will have wasted a year and a lot of time and money.  :\

So, I am hoping that my home education skills at putting together my own curriculum will pay off in a big way.  Wish me well and pray for my success, all who read here.  I will need the cooperation of others so pray that I will have favor with the right people for this to work out.

On another note, my husband is happier and healthier than he has ever been.  He is working on his shame issues with his therapist, and that seems to be the foundation of all his depression and repressed anger.  Life with him is really good.

Also, I started doing thirty minutes of gentle yoga most mornings and evenings.  I got my first yoga lessons as a Christmas present.  I am now twenty pounds lighter, way more limber, and also happier.  Did you know the "Ohm" sound is really the first and last letter of the Sanskrit alphabet (Alpha and Omega, anyone?) followed by the MMMM sound because it is made with mouth closed reminding one of the presence of God within (...the kingdom of God is within you).  Why are Christians so scared by yoga?  Crazy.

I have thought about taking the blog off line, but I still get regular visitors reading for how Bill Gothard negatively affected my life.  So, though I will rarely post, I am going to leave the blog up for now.  I wish more evangelical women in crappy home school marriages would read here.  They would find the bread crumbs I left, and maybe be able to follow them out to freedom for their own family.  That's my wish.

Peace and good will, SS

5 comments:

  1. leave it up!!!! even if you never post again. you never know when someone will trip over this blog and it will be exactly what she needed to read right then. it is the upside of the eternal internet--your stuff can stay up forever and always be useful. Like a dusty book in a library found at just the right moment in a person's life--or in my case, falls off the shelf at the used bookstore and lands on my foot!

    Hang tough on the education! You've learned a lot of things on-the-job. Most things in life are learned on-the-job. Especially the work of mothering, household management, and homeschooling. What curriculum there exists in those fields usually is more detrimental than helpful--as you well know--and the best work you've done has been what you figured out for yourself. You can do it, you can feel your way through it, you can find your mentors and resources and learning team for this just as you have for everything else of importance that you have ever learned!

    Yay, yay, and more yay, for hubby and you both finding more individual peace and balance! wish we both had more time/space to write more often and in depth about that. but YAY!

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  2. Hang in there, Shadowspring! I'm pulling for you! And by all means leave the blog up. I hope you post an update just like this one from time to time. Kudos to your husband on his progress in freedom!

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  3. Interesting to hear this from the parents' perspective. I grew up in ATI as the student, not the parent.

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  4. PS It all payed off- I scored near perfect on this scan test. Ha!

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