School Maze

Taking three night courses in different kinds of technical writing is too much for me. I've moved from slackerville to a 50 to 55 hour week of paid work, class attendance, and homework. This isn't as bad as it would be coming from someone else; it's not like I also have a child to raise or like my 30 hours/wk of brainless money-making taxes me. It's just that I'm finding it difficult to manage the other things of my life in the time left over, and it pains me to say to several inquiring loved ones, "I'll tell you what's going on in two weeks--if I possibly can." I have until now enjoyed the luxury of being able to have substantial conversations with most comers without nearly such long delays.

Until this session is over March 10, I basically cannot communicate with anyone for more than about ten minutes between Sunday afternoon and Thursday morning. Another unhappy concession is not being able to write in this blog nearly as often as I'd like.

On the up side, I'm not finding Cont Ed to be bobo at all. I'm learning new skills quickly since everything I learn in class is immediately applied. There are at least three items for reading or research and three to four writing assignments to be done each week.

My introductory Medical Writing course is a killer. It's tougher than anything I ever did in my Communication Studies BA. I had to dance all over the place to get into my university program so I was kind of shocked that anyone can just plunk down their money, walk into this class, and get slammed so hard. I think it's a challenging course for most, but it's especially difficult for people like me with no science background. I had to get an extension on an HIV drug clinical study results summary last week because it took me nine hours of reading, research, and analysis just to get ready to begin writing anything. It took seven internet searches and a conversation with an HIV-savvy nuclear engineer just to figure out what most of the study's abbreviations meant!

I am also learning by facing a teacher again rather than being one, for a change. Beyond having extensive experience in their respective fields (newspaper journalism, medical writing, and software manual production) my instructors are talented teachers as well. I am retrospectively critiquing my own teacherly performances in observing them and making mental notes as to how to emulate them when I teach or group-facilitate again.

My medical writing instructor I believe is making a mistake common to new teachers--one I've definitely made myself--of, in the interest of imparting as much useful information as is possible in a short course, throwing way too much at the students at one time. I'm really excited to be called upon to make lots of inferences and to do lots of self-directed research in order to complete my assignments (in contrast to the spoonfeeding of so many other courses I've taken in my life), but I am also so stressed out with how much homework there is that I worry I may have to drop this brain-tickling class or settle for a barely passing grade.

I definitely will have to if I don't stop here and get back to preparing my first study abstract for tomorrow night!