Finals

As my finals come to an end my stress level is slowing going down. I have begun to recieve my grades today and that has made my stress levels spike and I have to admit I have become an email checker addict. Since technology allows us to recieve our grades through our email I am constantly checking to see if a new one has popped up yet. I did have a near heart-attack when I recieved a very low mark for a class I have enjoyed going to and done well in. After tracking down the teacher and voicing my concern, the grade did not stand because he had not put in my mid-term grade. He graded the exam but it never made it into his computer, talk about a relief!

Goodluck to everyone on the rest of their test, and those who are graduating good luck in the real world!

FINALS WEEK

SO my presentation didn't crash and burn on Wednesday so I can't complain to bad... although I missed some information I wanted to share, but that is ok... I didn't do too bad.

This week is HELL week aka finals week. Although most of my finals were take home exams, I'm super stressed out, and I would like to say that Abnormal Psychology was the only exam that was NOT a take home... I am so throughly disappointed!!

Well back to studying.. GOODLUCK everyone!

Presentations

The presentations on Monday were all very good. I enjoyed all of them, but the one that stood out the most was the one that contained a young man speaking openly of a friend who has been having a very difficult year. The gentlemen has bi-polar disorder and personality disorder, and unfortunately has not been hanging out with the "right" crowd. I hope that things look up for both of them and they are able to continue their friendship.

As I had hoped I was bumped to Wednesday, which is very thrilling for me. I am a natural procrastinator so any reason not to do something is fine with me. I have been doing well this year because I haven't left too many projects to the last minute. I tend to leave papers until the night before but things that require presentation I give a few days. I do better at writing papers at the last minute, those that I spend an extensive amount of time on and done weeks in advance are the ones that get a lower grade. Which is odd because you would think that since I had so much time to revise it that it would be graded higher, but it is not the case so I will continue my last minute work.

The year is slowly coming to an end, which of course I am somewhat sad about but in truth I can't wait to be out of school! I will have a week off and then I will be working. Unfortunately I don't have a permanent job this summer because I am switching gears. For the past four years (five in June) I have been working at retirement community as a waitress in their dining room. It is a very fancy place and the residents pay a good chunk of change to live there. I enjoy it very much but the residents that were there when I started having started to die and the new people are great, it is just getting harder to work there. So I am going in the complete opposite direction and have applied to numerous jobs at summer camps.

Well I just went off on quite the tangent! Time to go do some work.. yes it is due tomorrow if you were wondering!

Class Cancelled

So as I mentioned before Wednesday's class was cancelled.... Which allowed me to catch up on some work I definitely needed to do!
Hope you all enjoyed the day off!

Presentations

For the next few days we are presenting to the class information and a case study we found on a certain disorder. On Monday there were some very interesting ones. I liked Shane's because he added his own personal story which made the information that much more powerful.

Wednesday we do not have class, which of course I am thoroughly disappointed about! So that means the presentations for Wednesday are moved back a day, which means that quite possibly my presentation due Monday will be bumped. Yet again I so disappointed by this series of events, so it may take a while for me to recover from my disappointment.

Ironic

Today we started class with a short discussion about our presentations. We have to pick a disorder in which we have studying during the semester.. yada yada yada. So I don't enjoy presentations, I don't enjoy speaking in front of people at all... and I realized how much anxiety I had when thinking about speaking in front of people. And then I remembered, I am tutor for a Fundamentals Of Speech class... hmm that is a little ironic!

Anyways... we reviewed tick disorders. The one I found most interesting was Trichotillomania aka hair pulling. I was curious to see if the people who have this disorder, know what they are doing while they are physically doing it. I would think that it would be painful, and socially unacceptable. I mean people seem to prize long hair. People who have cancer treatments and lose their hair are given sympathy for their disease and hair loss.

I decided to do some research on Trichotillomania and found this website, in case anyone is interested in learning more... http://www.trich.org/index.asp

Playground Rules of Survival

Today's class we started off by discussing the rules of the playground. Our class put together the rules that ruled the playground when we were younger. Rule number one, if you ask a teacher with help about a bully you will be beat up more. Rule number two, retaliate when the teacher is not looking. Rule number three, dodgeball puts you in the hierarchy of the school. Those were the basic ones, I remember dodgeball was one of the roughest games on the playground, but you always knew where you stood!

We also spoke about teaching styles of young children. How some teachers focus on having students express themselves in writing but do not do all the spelling corrections because it is possibly harmful to the students self-esteem. For me that doesn't make sense because the child will learn to spell words the wrong way continually. It is a learning experience so the child should not take it as a mark against them as a person.

I recently spent the day in a kindergarten class, observing both the morning and afternoon session. The teacher had a big board with "Star Words" written across the top, and in the grid like formation were words like he, she, like, it, I, be, and can. I asked the teacher to explain what "Star Words" were and she explained that the children have been reading books through out the year. In those books, are words of high frequency in our language, a.k.a "Star Words". So about each week or so a new word is introduced and the books go up in levels as the year progresses. Children bring the books home and review and read them with their parents.

That seemed to very well. The words they do not know in the books have pictures above the word to explain what it means. While I was there one child picked up a book she had yet to read before, and had many words that had not been reviewed and read it to me. She was so impressed with herself, she went around to read it to everyone! It was so cute!