Getting Up At 5AM

I've never been much of a morning person.

On days when I have to report to my field training site for summer school, I get up quite early.  I never used to get up this early at any point in my life.  It's not really the getting up early part that bothers me though, in fact I kind of like getting up early.

Trouble arises when I have to stay up the night before and complete assignments for my coursework.  It is then when I find myself getting in bed at midnight and resisting when my alarm goes off at 5.  Even though I'm pretty tired when I wake up, it still feels natural to regain at least some consciousness around 5AM.  I think I am rewiring my internal clock a bit.

If you haven't put 2 and 2 together yet, that is the situation precisely this morning.  I have two sizable assignments due today and I will be conducting one of the New York State mandated labs today at my field site.  I have yet to read the lab thoroughly so that I may properly administer it.  I guess that's what the train ride is for (if I can manage to read a lab on a crowded, rush hour L train).  I have a feeling this is a good sense of what the first year of teaching is going to look like.

Unprecedented Speed and Amount of Reading and Writing

No doubt, I am entirely capable of keeping up with the copious readings that come with especially intensive graduate school work. However, it seems the entirety of my commute and "free" time have been utterly and completely relinquished to the tasking of reading custom bound course texts. This is of course, not to mention the moderate amount of writing assignments to accompany these readings in the form of reflections, outlines of the readings, and journal entries. It is not specifically the amount of work that is taxing, but the rate at which it is expected to be executed. In the past two days, I have been expected to create two (thorough and comprehensive - 5 pgs each) outlines based on text, two journal entries, an autobiographical essay in addition to about 100 pages of reading.

Let me be clear. I am not complaining. However taxing of tasks these may be, I signed up for this and fully intend to see it through. These assignments are for my benefit and I am acutely aware of this. While I will not vocalize my venting to the instructor in class, others choose to do so, as they very well may. However, yesterday, the instruction gave us the snide comment, "welcome to grad school." Overall, I am gleaning a lot from her instruction, but I can see how a comment like that might come across and ridiculous and condescending to my peers, some of whom have advanced degrees and have completed post-doctorate work. To the post-docs especially, it's almost humorous. In actuality, I'm not really concerned about it, but just found it funny that someone of significantly lower formal academic accomplishment would venture such a snide remark to such a diverse group.

Aside from any negative aspects, training is interesting. Day by day, I feel like I'm getting a tool here for classroom management, a tool there for instructional design. I am also somewhat sleep deprived and mentally taxed, so any typos or grammatical errrors are purely an artifact of those facts.

As I have been so busy, I am not able to fully articulate my thoughts just yet, but I figured it would be best to post something within the first few days of training. Needless to say, I look forward to the weekend, but am definitely learning useful information during training.