Saturday, November 03, 2012

Schoolwork continues to haunt me

It has been absolutely awful this semester to get myself to do the work I need to do - reading articles and chapters? Really? I'm supposed to do that to get through my courses? Who knew? Gah. Most frustrating.

However, thus far the few things that have been graded have been in the A range, which is great. I'm sure I just cursed myself as I am waiting on one paper to still be returned. It was the most confusing time I've ever had with a paper- in class when we talked about it, it made total sense. Seemed straight forward, until I tried writing it. Then I just stared at the articles, the assignment, and blank word document, utterly stymied by what I was supposed to do with the information. This is the first time I have felt entirely stumped by a paper since, I don't know, maybe my first semester of undergrad. It was bloody awful, the most terrible feeling in the world. I am expecting a B if I am lucky. The second paper for that same class, which is the second step in the semester long project of assessing our clinical practice based on a client, needs to be finished by Monday morning. Gah. Plus I need to research criticisms of Satir's work for a group presentation on Tuesday afternoon, as well as figure out how I will demonstrate some of the experiential therapy techniques during the role play part of the presentation. 

On the plus side of things for the semester, it's been great fun having all my classes in person rather than 2-3 online. Very different experience and I am enjoying it. It's lovely to walk to the Pride Center two days a week, come home for lunch and then go to class - it feels so luxurious to do this. My Fridays are often low key, though I often have team supervision for about 2 hours and sometimes additional meetings - it still means I can sleep in, the beauty of having a supervisor who doesn't "do" mornings. 

My caseload is challenging and interesting but I will have to think deeply about what I write there because confidentiality is very important. Right now I have five clients who have all stuck; which means they came for the first session and kept coming back. So far, knock on wood. It is fascinating to think about the similarities and differences between some of them. I would like to devote more time to researching various theories and modalities in connections with, well, all of them. 

Another plus this semester is my home is regularly tidy, laundry (even the hand stuff) is being kept up on. I still adore my apartment even with the quirks of apartment living. My neighbor in the front part of our floor went from being dead silent to randomly noisy. He never opens or closes the toilet quietly from what I can tell! He seems to drop the same things every time he showers - at least that's what it sounds like. And yes I can hear the water from said shower if I'm in my closet of a kitchen.

Also I have been eating exceptionally well without being insane (mostly) about. Lots of salads, roasted veggies, homemade soups from the remains of pre-roasted chicken, little sugar, little gluten. I have discovered the lure of Greek yogurt via my favorite brand - Green Mountain Creamery. This is the first yogurt that I can imagine using as a substitute for sour cream; this is a serious statement because I deeply love sour cream and have scoffed at the notion of using yogurt in it's stead for years upon years.

Maybe now that I have publicly announced what a horrid student I have been, it will poke me into actually doing the readings that I know I will largely love if I just committed to reading them!

1 comment:

littlemissattitude said...

It won't help, probably, for me to say this, but when I was in school, usually the papers that I thought I didn't "get", one way or the other, were the papers I ended up getting the best grades and comments on.