Beginning in August, I will be using my MBA to teach college-level Economics classes to juniors and seniors in high school. I will also be using my education degree to teach English to some unsuspecting tenth graders.
This week, I received an email saying I had been chosen for a very special professional development opportunity. My Alma Mater, The University of Louisiana at Lafayette, hosts a teaching institute every year, where ten teachers are selected to work with author Ernest Gaines and curriculum specialists to plan lessons for high school english classes that center around Gaines’s novels. Gaines has many awards to his name, including recipient of the MacArthur Foundation’s Genius Grant and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. His novels are central to Louisiana culture, but are award winning and critically acclaimed. (Plus, almost every film/TV adaptation of his novels have won Emmys. NBD.)
I get the opportunity to work closely with this author and other English teachers from the area to develop a curriculum that incorporates these novels into student lives. I’m so excited! It also means that between now and June 8th, I need to read four novels by Ernest Gaines.
Then (because I’m crazy) I signed up for a 10-week course through Coursera, which is an organization that partners with many top-notch universities to provide free access to classes on a variety of subjects. I’ll be taking a 10-week course on Greek and Roman mythology through the University of Pennsylvania. We will be reading some of the epics, like the Odyssey, Oedipus the King, and Metamorphoses. That course starts at the end of April and runs until July.
For those of you keeping count, that’s a whole lot of reading for academic/professional purposes, and not a whole lot of fun reading. (I’ll be having fun… I just don’t know if you want me reviewing the Iliad on this blog!)
Jeromy made fun of me last night, saying that somehow, I always manage to land myself back in college, no matter how hard I try to graduate.
What can I say? I love being a student.
