Yesterday went extremely well. The only hitches in Thanksgiving were that everyone showed up late due to an accident on 880 so no one ate any of the appetizers (big freakin deal) and my sister/niece forgot the apple pie and rolls they promised (Sissy ran to Safeway and bought a pie and I had sneakily bought rolls Just In Case).
Everyone got along fantastically well. I was astonished. We had far fewer people than anticipated due to losing five people yesterday morning for a myriad of reasons. It was really nice though. I would go so far as to say I had a lot of fun. Towards the end of the evening Noah corralled all the youngsters into playing Give Me the Brain and Lord of the Fries for a while so I’m pretty sure he had a blast. 🙂 My mom and sister and I played Rummy and I lost abysmally but remained fairly cheerful. Shanna was on her absolute best behavior all day while playing by herself or being handed from relative to relative. Of course this means that my whole family is convinced that I have an abnormally mellow/good baby. 🙂
I did very little of the cooking and about half of the prep. Noah earned big fat credits that will probably turn into extra gaming time for him this weekend because he was so awesome. 🙂 The food was all thoroughly excellent and we have leftovers upon leftovers.
Even the rest of my mom’s visit was really good once the dog left. And the day we dropped the dog off I went to the high school I used to work at for a while and visited. Everyone made much of me telling me how much they miss me and how awesome I am. I felt really special and loved.
And over all of this wonderfulness is the pall that I am terrified of the comp exam. One more chance. I get one more chance before I have wasted years and years of work. I am so scared.
Good luck on comps…
When I applied to grad school, I didn’t get in the first time. They didn’t have a limit on how many times you could apply, but it was understood that if you didn’t get in the second time, you weren’t likely ever to get in. I did the requisite panicking, then put myself to improving where I could for my second chance. Everything turned out fine. I’ve heard tons of anecdotal evidence and some empiric that the mere act of going through it once improves your chances for the second time, without necessarily doing extra studying and all that. Which I know you’ll do anyway, because you’re you. Yes, be anxious, and yes, work your a$$ off for that second exam. But you know what the structure of the exam looks like now, you have an idea how the time vs thinking then writing works out now, and you’ll now be able to read some of the works you skipped for the last one – adding to your breadth & depth of resources to draw from for the next exam. It will work.
All that bldrnpdx says sounds very legit.
Plus, Ms. K, it is clear that you have put metric f*ck tonnes of work into teaching. You now know what to expect on the test. Do you know where to get the help you need? Are there people who tutor in your field? Is there some equivalent of Princeton Review or something or one of those in house test prep companies?
(If it were me, I’d need to schedule study time as if I were working. Hard to break away from Shanna but necessary.)
So glad Thanksgiving went swimmingly for you! What are “Give Me the Brain” and “Lord of the Fries”?!
“Give Me the Brain” and “Lord of the Fries” are silly games about Friedey’s, the Fast-Food Restaurant of the Damned. The players are zombie fast-food employees. In the first one, you have only one brain to pass around and you’re trying to finish all your tasks, but some of them require you to have the brain (and all are very silly). In the second one, you have a hand of cards like in rummy, but they’re ingredients (fish meat, bun, bird meat, drink, sauce, fries, cow meat, etc) and you have to assemble combo meals (“okay, I rolled a chickacheezabunga conga — so that’s a bird meat, a cheese and a bun, with fries and drink”) and play them like sets or runs in gin rummy.
Both are from Cheapass Games, a silly company that makes silly but very fun games.
When I was studying for the Praxis (I had to do a specific subject for my state license), I studied with a group in my cohort. We came across a set of study questions put together by the previous year for their comps. Most of us had elected not to do comps (thesis or project instead), but the study guide that group had put together was very helpful. And the guide was available to anyone *who asked*, but unless you went investigating, you wouldn’t have known it existed. I’m not saying you have easy access to a study group, but there might be old sets of test questions or study guides around, without it being cheating at all.