School. Daze.

My earliest class begins at 3:00 P.M., but, alas, because of the Fellowship work I'll be doing during normal school hours and the practicum I'll have to squeeze in somewhere, the visions of lazy mornings that danced in my head a few weeks ago are fading fast. Here's a look at my class schedule and a bit about my courses:

*MONDAY

Don't know much about this one yet, as we didn't meet yesterday for Labor Day. It's called Multisensory Teaching of Basic Language Skills, which means, well, I imagine just what it sounds like.

*TUESDAY

To earn my MA as a Reading Specialist, I have to complete three practica*, and this course (Practicum I: Literary Assessment and Intervention) is a preparation for the first one. Interestingly, I'll be slogging through the practicum and the class simultaneously; this isn't the ideal way to do it pedagogically, but it means I can complete the program in less time and is therefore ideal financially. I hope I'm a fast learner… Lots of reading in this class, assigned by a very nice professor who is herself a graduate of TC's reading specialist program. In a few weeks, I'll be assigned a "client," a local kid with reading problems, and attempt to fix him or her using all the strategies I've managed to absorb at TC thus far. Both of us will need luck. The clinic is actually located on the TC campus, which is quite convenient. Clients pay according to a sliding scale, some shelling out as little as $25 a semester for our services. As you can imagine, the waiting list to get a kid into the program is pretty long. There's a big need for that sort of thing around here.

*THURSDAY

My first class Thursday is taught by my beloved advisor, Dr. Masullo. It's called Theory and Technique of Reading Assessment and Intervention. Based on the syllabus, I'm going to learn here exactly the things I came to TC to demystify. Again, lots of reading required – seems to be a pattern. Like my practicum prep. class on Tuesdays, I get the feeling this will be a lot of symptom -> explanation -> solution. Perfect. I was excited to discover that we'll dedicate a fair amount of time on writing skills as well.

Next, I head off to a class called Cognitive Neuroscience and Education. Our professor does research at Columbia medical school; currently he's working on communication methods for nonverbal autistic children. It's the first time this class has been offered at TC, and interest, particularly among doctoral candidates, is quite high. It's a nice change to have some men in the room – all my other classes are all female. This one promises to be a challenge, although I find the subject pretty interesting, so I hope I'll be able to rise to it. Dr. Hoyte said on the first day that it wasn't going to be any more technical than could be helped and that the emphasis would be instead on the processes within the brain, but that didn't prevent the article I've been struggle with today consisting almost solely of sentences that look like this:

"There is a perceptual component in the sense that sensory events occurring within the neglected hemispace have a diminished impact on awareness, especially when competing sensory events occur in the contralateral hemispace."

After the first two or three pages, it got more interesting and very slightly more accessible, so I'm feeling a bit less panicky than when I first picked it up. The other articles I read for Thursday's class were much less focused on specific brain structures and therefore less likely to drive me to drink, suicide, or possibly one followed by the other. Whew.

*I've seen the plural of practicum written "practicums" and "practica". (Microsoft Word, in its infinite competency, has flagged both variations with a red squiggly line.) I prefer the latter, because, as Anthony pointed out, "'Practicums' sounds dumb."