This post is brought to you a week late by technical issues I never addressed because I didn’t.  It got stuck in the limbo of being a draft, and was never published until just now. 

This weeks worth of classes has been interesting.  It has gone from being a relatively calm classroom experience back the the more familiar territory of exams and preparing presentations.  With no 800 word english essays or 20+ page political science papers due in this program I’ve definitely felt a little bit unsure of what I’m actually doing.  Now that my first exam and presentation are behind me things are feeling a little more like I’m used to.  Back into that imaginary comfort zone I go!  That said, my first presentation was not  a difficult one.  Its three minutes on a topic of my own that I feel relates to the social studies curriculum.  And in a whole other area, I was proposed to during my Wednesday observation at Lambrick park.  I’m not sure if the girl will remember the proposal next week, but it was amusing.

The exam was not something I was used to.  Multiple choice and short answer.  What the heck is that all about?  I don’t think I’ve had a multiple choice exam since my first year of classes?  If not then it was way back in the day when I did trade school, but that’s about a decade and a half ago now.  I’ve had some fill in the blank type questions along the way, but EVERYTHING has been “you have three hours to write as much as you can on one of these topics” type exams.  So I went into this one feeling like I was hooped, but coming out feeling like I was radically over prepared.  There were no trick questions (except maybe one?) and everything was straight forward.  I definitely blanked on a few and went the educated guess route, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be.

I wrote a brief three page paper as a draft, and had to speak for three minutes on the topic of the paper.  This was pretty straight forward, and really not a lot of time to have to worry about.  Three minutes goes ridiculously quickly and you really only have time to either hit several key points, or focus on a single idea.  So I was able to streamline this presentation in the forty five minutes or so before class began that morning, present it a few minutes after I finished figuring out what I was going to say, and then discuss it in a breakout group.  I definitely went a little outside the box with my presentation, but there really are no guidelines for it, so I wasn’t worried.  Discussing it with my group went well, particularly since the 8-9 of us in the group have been paired together pretty much every week for this class as our instructor creates breakout rooms alphabetically.  

I have another presentation coming up next week that will take some mental effort, but that’s a problem for future Aaron.  He really doesn’t like past Aaron sometimes.  I’m sure I am making this semester easier on myself than it should be by sort of picking and choosing the areas I want to stress about, but that’s the up side of having a small health crisis at the start of the semester.  I’m not pushing deadlines back at all, but I’m definitely deciding what’s important and what isn’t.