The first weeks of class have come and gone and man has it ever been a roller coaster.  Going into this semester I felt foolishly prepared.  By the end of my undergrad in December I understood how university worked and had all my systems in place  to succeed, nothing was going to stop me when I got into the PDPP program.  Was I ever wrong…  Somewhere between graduating and coming back everything I knew about anything went and flipped itself upside down.  Suddenly the brilliant system I had devised of keeping my household together, managing the odd work project, spending time with my family, and managing a full course load had vanished.

Now here I am, a few weeks in and for the first time in my life, I felt done and ready to pack it in.  Admittedly, there is a level of mental health involved in that, and I knew those feelings would end.  But I definitely had a Monday morning after dropping my kids off at school where I was ‘in class,’ staring at a computer screen, and actively debating just turning off the screen and walking away from what has already been a five and a half year journey.  I knew I wouldn’t do it, both because I’ve worked too hard to get here, but also because by the time Wednesday rolled around my mental state would have improved.  It is a bit of a roller coaster, but one I am getting used to.

Dropping in to the PDPP program was different than the degree I had just finished.  Not only are the classes and most of the people different, but the setting has changed entirely.   I chose UVic, and a longer trek to becoming a teacher, because I did not want to The first weeks of class have come and gone and man has it ever been a roller coaster.  Going into this semester I felt foolishly prepared.  By the end of my undergrad in December I understood how university worked and had all my systems in place  to succeed, nothing was going to stop me when I got into the PDPP program.  Was I ever wrong…  Somewhere between graduating and coming back everything I knew about anything went and flipped itself upside down.  Suddenly the brilliant system I had devised of keeping my household together, managing the odd work project, spending time with my family, and managing a full course load had vanished.

Now here I am, a few weeks in and for the first time in my life, I felt done and ready to pack it in.  Admittedly, there is a level of mental health involved in that, and I knew those feelings would end.  But I definitely had a Monday morning after dropping my kids off at school where I was ‘in class,’ staring at a computer screen, and actively debating just turning off the screen and walking away from what has already been a five and a half year journey.  I knew I wouldn’t do it, both because I’ve worked too hard to get here, but also because by the time Wednesday rolled around my mental state would have improved.  It is a bit of a roller coaster, but one I am getting used to.

Dropping in to the PDPP program was different than the degree I had just finished.  Not only are the classes and most of the people different, but the setting has changed entirely.   I chose UVic, and a longer trek to becoming a teacher, because I did not want to do online classes.  I enjoy the personal interactions that come along with in person classes, I enjoy interacting with my professors, and I like getting out of my house.  None of those are options right now.  Toss in the 42,000 different means of communication we have and it can definitely be overwhelming.  Yes, 42,000 may be a bit of an exaggeration, but I’m not actually sure if it is.  I currently have six different google classrooms I can juggle, and there are no options to consolidate them all into one which is a serious pain.

At this point in time I have connected with all the different platforms, but have yet to sort out Tweetdeck and Hootsuite, but those will happen soon enough.   The sheer amount of things we were expected to sign into and figure out all at the same time was a bit much.  It is not that they are difficult things to figure out, it is more that the learning curve for that many different things all at once really slowed the process down.  Flipping from brightspace to a blog, to mattermost, over to trello, then into an independent website to figure out what I’m supposed to be doing next does not leave much time to really understand how all these platforms work.  Instead I have kept my head above water and managed to gain a basic understanding of how they all work, with one exception: Twine!

After five and a half years of university the best class I have ever been in was Multiliteracies with Rich as a guest speaker who introduced us to Twine.  I have a passion for creative writing, and definitely considered trying to use my open inquiry blog to explore that in a new way, but decided to go a different route with it and leave the creative writing for my friends to deal with.  I GM / co-GM / host an online version of Mafia (its a social deduction game, very similar to Ultimate Werewolf if you know of that game) with a group of people who started off as a dozen friends and has slowly expanded to be about 40-50 people.  Its a passion project for me to be sure, and I am always looking at ways to make it more interesting for myself and the people who play my games.  I’ve hosted a Shakespearean Western, a San Diego Comicon themed game, National Geographic in an apocalyptic future, and am just now wrapping up a Hunger Games themed event.  Expanding on the idea of the basics of Mafia we often throw in a few mini games for fun if we know there will be a longer pause between “nights.”  These events can be a little time consuming and operate as a choose your own adventure with rewards and death potentially happening.  I enjoy them, and the players look forward to them.  But they aren’t really something that you can experience all of, until now!  After the class that introduced Twine I spent about an hour polishing up a story that could be run through for the current game of Mafia.  All five players who had no choice but to participate did so, then the other 36 players and my co GMs had the opportunity to go through and play, and it went over incredibly well.  Of the five who played, only two made it through alive.  I will include a link to the game I ran, with the ability to go back to the previous screen re-enabled at the end of this post.

I have debated many different ways to incorporate Mafia into a classroom, and have friends in Minnesota and Oregon who have been putting my ideas to the test with great results.  When my PDPP program is done and I am working as a teacher, be it english or socials, I will have functional versions of this game up and running as classroom activities.  Twine may not be an active part of these adventures, but man oh man, learning about this has been amazing and I plan to put it to really good use with my out of school interests and my own children.  Choose your own adventure bedtime stories have been a regular thing in our house for the last six and a half years, and now I have a way to guide them as they create their very own stories.  So regardless how things shake out, that one class has made my entire education 100% worth it.  I have a feeling my text is not really getting across the excitement I have for this platform, but trust me, I am pumped!

Here is a link, hosted by a friend of mine on his company website, to the mini game I ran.  So far 44 people that I know of have gone through it, with 11 or 12 having survived to the end (which is less than I was expecting) in their first play through.  If you make it through let me know!

Https://cyngergydigital.com/content/hungore-games-final.html

Next up, throwing kids in the lake before the first contact staff lesson!