i have homework. i'm an old student. my clothes are not girl-like, they don't even match. my UH tuition, per credit, managed to exceed my grad school tuition. what, the, fuck?

ok, i've whined a lot these past couple of days. "my grad advisor is a bitch." "grad school is expensive." "this book was $90." "my classes are being held all over the island." but today, on the familiar walk to campus from the parking circus that is oahu ave, i caught myself mentally bitching about time and cost and realized -- this is graduate school. i didn't even want this, to start. then i wanted it, really really really bad, and didn't get it. and then got another shot at it. and here i am, whining incessantly about long walks, long drives, and heavy books. no promises or anything, but i'm going to try REALLY hard to cut it out.

so i went to my first class today -- the undergraduate part of the G-school regimen. i have class with maybe a hundred freshmen and sophomores. we're going over piaget and skinner and all that, and we got to watch about six minutes of "bambi" that supposedly illustrated a thousand behavioral theories at once.

the prof is a bEd and mEd, and he managed to make it very clear from this one lecture that he loves working with kids, that he loves his own kids and that he's very anti-spanking. i agreed with most of the things he said -- he shared a lot of parenting techniques, and while i'm not a parent i work with a lot of them (well, not as much as before right now) and i'm always updating my mental database of what works and what doesn't, and what i wish these parents i work with would try. anyway, one thing i wasn't enthusiastic about was his advice (you'd think this was a child-care class) on handling negative behavior such as tantrums: as long as the child is not endangering himself or anyone else, allow him to engage in his negative behavior, but ignore it. acknowledge good, ignore bad. like with the dolphins at sea world. with kids, this works maybe 10 percent of the time. having taken one step back from Kiddiepark, i don't agree with their philosophy either, which is to punish tiny transgressions and severely punish large ones. but i know that kids, left alone in a tantrum or engaged in some other negative behavior, can keep it up for a long, long time. waiting your one child out in a supermarket is one thing, but waiting out one child in a classroom of 26 with special needs (kindergarten is one big Special Need) is something else. i'm sure he's talking parenting, but teaching is why i'm in this class, so i'm trying to take away as much as i can that might be remotely applicable sometime in the future ...

so i'm an honorary freshman. but gone are the days of twinkie breakfasts, and gone is my mental map of every soda machine on campus. gone complete set of gelly roll pens, gone free t-shirt for signing up for student credit card. only backwards-cap cigarette-breath freshman seatmate and $90 textbook left.

work -- alrighty. it's like this: short blocks with each class every day. makes no sense to me, considering i could spend a full (half) day with each class once a week instead of insubstantial daily blocks of time. but maybe 35 minutes of relief a day (26 kids per class) is worth it to them. we'll see how it goes.

p.s. all you e-mailers with your panties in a twist, ok, i stand corrected: l'avenue des champs-elysees. cut me a break, i've only been to paris las vegas. merci! :)