Closing Time

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.

Deep Breath. I cannot believe this is over. It is very strange. I wanted so bad to talk to you all – but I woke up Monday with a bad cold so I voted against a video.

The past year has been intense. Lots of ups and downs and yet I have stuck with the program and I am earning a master’s degree. It is funny to be to have a master’s degree as I do not in any way feel I am a master. I know there is always more to learn and I will always be growing. To be a master sounds very final. 

Because of this program I have learned APA format. I know that sounds silly but when I was in college it was not enforced. I didn’t learn it in high school. So I struggled with APA writing but now I feel like a have a grasp on it. As with learning any new skill – it gives me a confidence boost.  

This program has solidified my belief in not judging others. I was once the queen of judgment. But as I began working, I learned that judging others is a waste of my own energy, it hurts people and it offers no solution to problems – usually it creates more.  As I learned more in school, I would be bolstered by the readings and I would (as politely as I could) ask my colleagues at work to think about their own judging. Sometimes it went fine other times it didn’t. I am glad that I can make myself look at things from different perspectives. 

Another thing I learned from being in this program is that there are a whole lot of people interested in the same things I am. This was huge for me. In my life it has been hard to find people who cared like I cared and were concerned about issues without being apathetic. I loved learning there are other people who think like me and care about what I care about. Discussion boards with classmates, research articles, professional networks…there is an entire group of people who are involved with early childhood. It’s awesome.

I don’t know if I have a concrete long term goal. Hmmm…. My dream is to be able to have a self sustaining life. So I guess my long term goal is make enough money to live, eat, and support myself on my own WHILE remaining in the field of early childhood.  I would like to see teachers in early childhood education embrace education. My experience has taught me that people do not like learning. But it is so important. I hate it when people are all jaded and act like they know everything and cannot learn. Maybe as an adult educator I can get people jazzed about education.

I am a bit sad about completing this program. It means I have to begin a new life. I don’t like that. It scares me. I will miss talking to people on the discussion boards. I will miss the readings. I liked learning new things each week. I have felt so supported throughout this whole program. I will miss that feeling. I am so glad I have gotten to have this experience. I am glad I have gotten to know each of you and your interests. I hope we all succeed in what we want in life. I’m on Facebook if you want to keep in touch.  

Farewell.

*Closing Time is song by Semi Sonic from the late 90’s*

6990 week 6 global search

This week we are to search for international jobs we could apply for. I laugh at this a little because I don’t want to move to the next county let alone across the world. But if that’s where the jobs are, and I do want a job I guess I’ll have to suck it up, right?

First stop UNICEF. I have heard about UNICEF since I was a little girl. I know they do good work that is meaningful to all people. I looked around their employment website only to learn that I am not qualified to work for them.   For example Education Specialist Sierra Leone needs to have rights knowledge and years of experience. I hate it when jobs require years of experience. How do we get experience? The jobs that don’t require it usually don’t have anything to do with the field I want to enter so I could be working for ten years yet still have no experience. Whatever I have issues.  I move on from UNICEF.

Next stop Save the Children. For whatever reason, Save the Children is less intimidating than UNICEF. I think that must be in my head because both are big deal organizations doing amazing work for the children of the world.  I actually found one or two postings here I could do. I could be an early childhood coordinator as I meet the requirements. Yet I saw no mention of education the way UNICEF did….and we all know how I feel about education [winky face]. However I lose the job at the “must be from the community” part. If only this position was available in my own community – I would rock this job like nobody’s business. 

You know what would be awesome? If I could create a job for myself. I would go to different places and ask to be their adult/early childhood liaison (or something that sound equally fancy). I want to be a person who works with adults explaining why various aspects of early childhood are important.  I want to be the person who designed the Word on Walls at the Children’s Museum. I want a job where I can combine all my interests. Is there a job where I can get jazzed about books without having to get more schooling? I don’t know what will happen. Life kinda sucks in that aspect. I am not good with the not knowing. 

Next stop UNESCO. Not so much. I am not a member of a donor country. I don’t speak any other languages. I am under thirty two with an advanced university degree.  So I meet the more general requirements of working in their young professionals program but not the important ones.  Since they are asking so much of young people I figure the professional positions are only harder to qualify for so I move on.  

I tried a few of the other pages but they were shut down or I was redirected.

Next I try good old Google.  Overwhelming mistake. I do not suggest you google.

So I continue on, getting more and more discouraged as I go. Frankly I miss college where an advisor hooks you up with a list of agencies that you could be suited for – taking the hard stressful part away. Alas there is no such thing as an after college life advisor. 

Well I’ve decided to give up. Chances are I will not be an international worker. I watched Sing Your Song recently – a documentary about the life of Harry Belafonte. He has dedicated his life to social activism both in the United States and countries in Africa. As I watched I thought to myself, I do not have the strength for that kind of work.  I want a small life here in Virginia.  I shrug my shoulders. Who knows? 

6990 week 4 Gray Skies Are Gonna Clear Up....

.... Put on a Happy Face...How fitting that Dick Van Dyke won the SAG Lifetime Achievement award last Sunday. It must have been an omen because this week has been swell.

This week I learned about NPEN.org. This is the National Parenting Education Network. It is all for people who work with parenting. I met with Liz Pierce for my week 4 interview because she works for Children's Museum of Richmond.Our conversation led to her telling me about NPEN, incidentally she is the chair of it. However I am having trouble signing up for the free listserv….so we shall see how it goes. At the current moment I don’t have spare funds to join organizations.

Playing on the internet I found NAECTE – National Association Early Childhood Teacher Education. They have their own journal as well. I hope to find good information there. However in their paper they advocate only a certification and I would like to challenge the country’s day care/preschool system to require four year degrees [though I am slowly thinking that two year degrees may be sufficient though not the best]. Something about college changes people’s thinking. It expands their mind and the way they think. It teaches them to entertain idea other than their own and not feel pressure to accept the new ideas as their own. College is important.  But that is just my opinion. http://www.naecte.org/

I found a specific organization that may be helpful to me. It is called nacctep.org. It stands for National Association of Community College Teacher Education Programs. Woot! This one sounds really good. They offer scholarships to students to help them become teachers. It is for both early childhood and k – 12.  Basically they want community college to be a part of recruiting, preparing and retaining new teachers. I am super supportive of this. As I mention above, two year degrees are ok. I hope that community college will inspire people to continue and earn the BA’s. I have worked with people who've earned two year degrees and though they are better than those with no education – it is not the same as “regular” college. 

I am super aware that I am heavily influence by my own experience, my own values and thoughts. I am influenced by my own self. This has potential to be bad but for now it is helping me survive. I want to do well in this class and in this class I need a focus. My focus is I want to improve the education of teachers so that when they go into the classroom they will be able to think. Yes this focus is super selfish. I don’t want to work with people who are dumb as bricks nor do I want to send my kids to a center where they will be taught by those dumb as bricks.  So perhaps what I really want to do is improve critical thinking and mind opening. I want to challenge the “this is how we've always done it” mindset of early education. 

This week at church, I met a woman at church who works for the STAR initiative. STAR is creating a database of all the early care centers and rating them based on a whole bunch of areas. The center I worked for was preparing to be rated when I left. We talked about my education and I could be a rater for them. This was a thrilling experience. It was huge confidence boost – an assurance that I am not wasting my time in early child studies teaching adults. It was really good.

I also had a revelation this week. I don’t know where my life will take me. I want to see there are options out there for me. I am afraid of focus because in my past what happens when I focus is I latch onto that one idea and cannot see or accept the rest of the world. The job market is not a fully stocked grocery store at the moment and I need to be ok that I do not have to follow one path. It is ok that I may end up teaching, I may not. I may end up at STAR or doing parenting classes or doing any number of things. I am afraid that if I focus sooo much on this capstone project I will forget that there is a great big world out there and the world will not end if I pursue a different path from what I planned.

6990 WEEK 2. Sad Face.

This has been the most discouraging week.

I have learned that I am not job material. I have too specific a degree that over qualifies me for a lot of work yet makes me unqualified for a lot of work at the same time. It’s like that song from Avenue Q – “What do you do with a B.A. in English? What is my life going to be? Four years of college and plenty of knowledge has earned me this useless degree. I can’t pay the bills yet cause I have no skills yet. The world is a big scary place” (Lopez & Marx, 2003,track 1).

  To make matters even more confusing, I was living in the illusion that earning a Master’s degree increases my financial opportunities. This is not true. See, I have this silly dream of being able to move out of my childhood home and still afford to buy food and gas. Crazy, right?

Apparently I am still only eligible for center jobs which is not what I want to do, and those jobs pay the same as when I was stopped working. [I resigned from work so I could focus on just on school] I have always known that jobs that care for human beings are bad paying jobs because we’re a country that doesn’t value humans the way it values business. However I am of a generation (I just learned) that values money (Nilson, 2010).  I imagine this would not be as big a deal if I was married because there would be two incomes to live off of but I am not married – no where even close to married so it’s just me earning money for me to live on. As of now, this seems very unlikely.

My dream would be to work as a teacher at a community college. (I realized very quickly I will never work at a four year University as I do not have nor do I want a PhD.) I love my course materials and thinking about classroom life and I like the idea of using what I know from life and school and teaching others. And in the dream I would earn $40,000 a year.  But that is not real life.

Another job I would be interested in having is to work at a museum either on the planning team or the outreach team. I remember in school when museums would come to school or we would go visit museums and there would be a person there to talk to us and teach us about what was going on. I could be that person but apparently not according to the job search websites.

Oh there are lots of interesting jobs out there that I would like to do but I am not able to apply for them as I don’t have this or that. I don’t have a Phd. The idea of pursuing a Phd makes me want to vomit. I don’t have three or more years of experience in teaching. (I kind of do in that I worked in a daycare center for almost three years but I’m pretty sure that doesn’t count. 

As I searched around for jobs I realized that I should not have changed my mind in the middle. I thought I knew what I wanted to do but then I changed my mind. I hate having more than one interest. So basically the lesson is don’t get a Masters degree unless you are 120% sure you want that exact job. 

References

Lopez, R. &  Marx, J. (2003). What do you do with a B.A. in English. On Avenue Q, Music from the Musical [itunes]. New York, NY: RCA Victor Broadway.

 Nilson, L. B. (2010). Teaching at its best: A research-based resource for college instructors (3rd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Almost there

This begins the last eight weeks of my Masters program. I can't believe it. I am almost done with my classes. So weird. and of course there is the dread that comes with a new phase of life. 

Instructional Strategies and Capstone will be the cause of all stress or bliss I may feel in the upcoming weeks. 

Deep Breath. I can do it. 

6165. Keep Moving Forward

As our core classes draw to a close I am sad to leave the people I’ve come to know. I looked forward to reading blog and discussion posts. It’s like making friends in the cyber world. I rely on my classmates to help me understand what we are talking about. I need the many perspectives to help me see beyond my own world.

Walt Disney taught me a wonderful lesson. There’s a great big beautiful tomorrow Shining at the end of every day. All of our tomorrows are beautiful. We rock.

Thank you for being a partner on this mad journey. 

6165 - You won't understand. It's a camp thing.

Once Upon a Time I was in high school. During this phase of my life I had some wonderful adjourning experiences. 

Every summer I would go to Tri Cities Workcamp in Petersburg, Virginia with my church. TCW is a camp where high schoolers from all over the East Coast come and we gather to fix up homes for those living in poverty. So the first day of camp we play all kinds of games and do lots of silly things to loosen us all up and get to know one another. Then we are divided up into crews. You spend almost all of the week with your crew. Obviously the crews bond like crazy over the week. So the last day of camp once the work is done and we return to base the rest of the night is reserved for adjourning. We gather in our crews and do affirmations. This is when everyone in the crew goes around the group and says positive things about one another. A gift they bring, what they like about a person, a specific memory…anything that will make the other person feel loved.  There is usually crying and hugging involved.

Another thing about TCW is throughout the week we write “care cards”. On the first day of camp every camper gets an envelope to decorate with their name and crew number. Those envelopes are then taped to a wall in the dining hall – like a giant mail wall. Anyways all week long people write these little notes to one another and on the last day of camp we are allowed to take our envelopes home.  This is one of the best things. We get to read all the notes people have given to us. It’s wonderful. 

I remember learning about the “termination process” in college when I was studying social work. To this day I think that is an awful phrase.  But the point is – the end of a process is important and needs to be given special attention. You recap all you've done and make a future plan.  Maybe a better name would be something more positive sounding like – future process, or the Yellow Brick Road process – something that doesn’t sound like a killing machine.