My Comfort Zone

I just completed the first week's assignments for my next class:  Research and Evaluation in Education.

I hate this class.  HATE this class.

My first grad-level class was a beautiful experience--every assignment was interesting, I devoured every text, and I enjoyed every assignment.  Isn't that what grad school is supposed to be?  Studying what you love and minimizing the stuff you hate?

Yeah.  I was afraid it would be too good to last.

This latest class takes me to a place I haven't visited in many, many years--a place I hadn't seen in so long that I didn't think it even existed any more.

I've been taken outside My Comfort Zone.

Reading the textbook is like reading archaic English: most of the words are familiar, and it should make sense because the nouns and verbs agree and all, but so many unfamiliar terms are thrown in (and many more terms that reek of familiarity but connote something totally different in this context) that I find myself consulting a dictionary many times while reading each paragraph.  Terms like hermeneutics and deliberative democratic evaluation and evaluand plague my attempts to learn the material.  I shouldn't feel too bad, I guess.  Spell check doesn't recognize evaluand, either.

I'm no stranger to writing, ya know?  I mean, I've been a faithful blogger for almost five years now--over 1100 posts under my literary belt--and I know my way around a keyboard.  These crappy writing assignments are foreign and awkward and clinical and  . . . boring. I'm learning new terminology and new citation style (oh, how I hate APA format). I had forgotten how I detest being forced to write about boring stuff.

I'm having to FORCE myself to read the material, FORCE myself to prepare for tests, FORCE myself to define a research topic that doesn't a) bore me half to death, or b) challenge me so much that my brain explodes. That's a fine line to walk, my friends.

Rarely in my middle-age, stay-at-home-mom stage of life do I have the experience of doing what I don't want to do, completing what I don't what to do when I don't want to have it done, and doing it with a "You're welcome!" coming from my lips. I don't like not being in charge of my own fate.  I don't like learning things I don't like learning.  And call me persnickety, but I especially don't like being graded arbitrarily by some faceless teacher that uses the wrong form of "to" in her emails. I'm feeling a little bit more sympathy for my school kids who complain that a subject is too hard or too boring.

I have to read peer-reviewed or peer-written articles about my purpose statement.  What ASU doesn't know is that my peers are all forty-something moms of a hundred kids who read Dan Brown for a challenge, not The Role of Culture and Cultural Context: A Mandate for Inclusion, the Discovery of Truth and Understanding in Evaluative Theory and Practice. Yes, that's a real article.  No, I have no idea what the title means.

I keep reminding myself that it's only seven more weeks of this, that I can do anything for seven weeks, that I have written fourteen-to-sixteen page papers in the past and that I can do it again, even under duress.

I also have lurking in the back of my mind this formidable possibility:

My next class could be even worse.

Say it ain't so.