Saturday, April 14, 2012

The other senior year in a nutshell: The end of it all

Here it goes.

Spring/Summer
Spring was spent in Europe. Yeah. You've heard about that already here, and here, and here. And here and here and here.  So you are not in want of information on that excursion.

Summer was spent working. I had 20 hours at the TMA office and 10 hours as Lauri's TA. But then on the first day back as Lauri's TA I was asked to TA another Humanities class for another 10 hours a week. So yeah, working three jobs 40 hours a week. Ended up being a little busy.

I did find time to finally meet my friend Mikey at a wedding reception for one of my BF's Jake (both of whom will appear in the BYU celebrity post). And I ended up getting to know Mikey really well that summer, which was needed for me. I hadn't had a good guy friend in a long time, and it's a lot easier to not have to worry about chemistry with a guy when he's married. Easy peasy.

Fall semester
A new PAC family was made this year! I ended up becoming really close to some people who were my "students" in SPAC. I also got to experience a different director. My first year dearest Edwin G. Austin was our director. And this year it has been Jeanette Geslison.

This was the semester of extra practices for PAC. We had two guest choreographers (Luba from Ukraine and Richard from Hungary) and lots of performances.

As for the academics, this was the semester of education classes. I kind of decided to take all the education classes in one single semester. I heard they were all pretty useless (kind of true, sadly, but I think it's just the nature of the beast) and you might as well get them over with quickly. So I took classroom management, adolescent development, multicultural education, educating students with disabilities, practicum in social science teaching, and history teaching methods. They were nearly all block classes and...all started second block. Yeah. So the first half of my semester was full of folk dance and the second half was full of education classes.

I got over my fear of research papers in my Capstone research seminar. I researched Senator Reed Smoot and yes, he hurried along the depression with a silly tariff. Thankfully my paper ended before that section of his life. In this class I also finally read a book about the Black Death that was extremely interesting. Weird that it's taken this long to write a book that makes the Black Death interesting. People love death!

Finally, I took Dance 474: Advanced Percussive Foot Styles. This was THE best dance class I have ever taken. Greg Tucker was the teacher (once again, the only clogging teacher I've ever had). We learned French Canadian, crazy hard clogging, tap (yessssssssssssssssssss), and Irish. It was bomb. And in this class I bonded with the dear dear Amber Shepherd who is basically my favorite human.

Oh and I not only saw Savion Glover perform, but also took a workshop from him. Oops, I almost blogged about that but never did.

Winter semester
I student taught.

And worked 20 hours a week for the most part.

And was in PAC (thankfully no mid-semester tour this year!) with a few weekend shows and mid-week shows as well.

You're not supposed to do anything BUT student teach, required to not have jobs or other classes. Oops.

So I was an hour late to PAC everyday (at least) and always felt behind on the times. I thought I'd never make it at some points. But I did! At the beginning of the semester I heard that one student teacher had said student teaching was the hardest thing she'd ever done including losing her father to cancer. I thought she was crazy. But now I see where she was coming from, though I wouldn't necessarily go that far.

I was teaching partners with Maddie Belnap, someone I never would have chosen but am entirely glad I was able to learn from her all semester. My mentor teacher Wendy King is probably the most on top of it person in the whole wide world and a wonderful teacher to learn from. And I have a newfound love for the orange and blue of Timpview High School.

And then I graduated. 


Okay or I will next week. Close enough.

The end.

PS, sorry I didn't write down funny quotes from this year in my computer and I've already packed up all my notebooks.

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