There are three ways UTM students approach spring break. Some will have these elaborate plans to travel the country or region, but never make it out of the state. Others achieve it. The third group consists of those with far less exciting plans. Welcome to group three.
Monday morning Samantha has a doctor appointment that was cancelled back in December for a family emergency. We'll be leaving tomorrow to head to Lewisburg to spend a few nights. If she feels up to it, we'll probably spend the rest of the afternoon in Cool Springs.
Tuesday we'll head to the Apple Store to replace her iBook's power adapter. An accident late last month found the iBook in the floor and the power plug bent. We learned what happens when, on an incline, the resisting force (friction between base of iBook and the laptop stand) is significantly less than the driving force (gravity). Can you tell I've been studying landslides this semester? After that, it's off to see the Nashville Predators take on the Vancouver Canucks.
Beyond that, the likely end to my final spring break in college will find me/us sitting in the office handling those administrative details that tend to get overlooked while classes are in session. I have an independent study course that I am yet to crack the book for. I also have a Senior Seminar portfolio that is nearing three-quarters completion. It is my intention to throw that on here as soon as I am finished. There's also that Web site overhaul I've been trying to find the energy to complete for the newspaper. I've started tinkering around again with it, but I'm not getting the same mental traction I had since I stopped using my PC.
A different kind of break ...
In other news, my high school newspaper reports that my senior English teacher is retiring. Faye Green (apparently the reporter missed the importance of a first name) has worked for Hillwood since 1988 and as an educator since 1969. Here is a little commentary about one of those years.
I wasn't an "English person." I repeated this a great deal growing up as an excuse for why I consistently made Cs and Ds in the classes. My mother has a degree in the subject, and taught it at a college level, so perhaps it was a bit of not wanting to follow that route. I'll leave that one up for interpretation, but rest assured I did not envy anyone who spent their days concerning themselves with gerunds, run-ons, dangling modifiers or objects of prepositions. I still don't.
Mrs. Green changed much of that. She had declared a metaphorical war on poor ACT scores in English for her students. It was a cause she drove home with six to 10 weeks of practice tests and discussions of every last part of speech a sentence could possess. My disdain of previous English classes came from disliking literature. We took these tests and discussed the results down to a science. It became more of a scientific look at our language than your typical grammar class. She explained it in a way that hit home with me: language is nothing more than a math problem of subject and verb. The rest of the sentence must interact with those two elements in a logical and organized fashion.
It just clicked.
A friend of mine and I made it a daily competition to see who would score higher on these ten-question quizzes. We consistently scored 9s or 10s on even the toughest of the questions. Learning was made to be fun, something I think is missing from many classrooms. Even when the rest of the year was spent studying the typical British Literature topics, it just breezed by. For the first time in a very long time, I enjoyed classes again. My grades and ACT scores reflected that.
Faye Green is a Hillwood treasure, and is the model for what I expect out of every high school instructor. She possessed the right balance of humor, toughness, and the unending desire to see her students succeed. I owe my current major and chosen profession to her and my mother. This isn't to say I would not have enjoyed myself as an Information Systems major, but I have found journalism to be far more personally rewarding.
Well done.