Cruz into November

Happy Halloween from San Francisco! Today I am having a 'homework afternoon' in which I hang out at a cafe and do homework with my friend A who is a full-time graduate student. She has way more homework than I do. Hence the blogging.

Like A, I work much more efficiently in libraries and coffee shops than I do at home. If I decide to go to graduate school myself, the first order of business will be to procure a laptop so that I can take my work on the road. For the class I am currently taking, I have had to write my papers on the desktop and, in so doing, have proven that I am still miserably unproductive at home.

So today we work hard and tomorrow we reward ourselves with a road trip to Santa Cruz! That will be an all-new destination for me. I'll tell you all about it next week, but right now I guess I should get back to my assignment.

Baby Talk

I am just over a month into my community college course in 'Human Growth and Development' (see here and here) and it has been a splendid experience so far. I lucked out with a very capable instructor who aptly breaks up our three hour and forty-five minute evening class periods into smaller, easier to swallow sections of lectures, small group discussions and videos. (Even so, I don't know what I would do without the Dunkin Donuts across the street.)

I have been finding the subject matter fascinating. Here's a tiny sampling:

- A newly fertilized egg survives without any nourishment from the mother for up to two weeks as it makes its way through the fallopian tube to the uterus and implants itself.
- Following childbirth, the uterus continues to contract for several weeks. (This is how it 'shrinks.') A few women report more pain from these contractions than from those accompanying childbirth. (!) Breastfeeding helps stimulate the secretion of oxytocin, which encourages the uterus to contract back to (approximately) its pre-pregnancy size.
- Infants literally grow overnight. Researchers have measured growth of up to a full inch in less than 24 hours in infants up to 21 months.
- Hopi infants spend the first year of their lives strapped to a board yet begin to walk at about the same time as children in other societies.
- Researchers who re-wired the brains of baby ferrets so that visual input was sent to the auditory cortex instead of the visual cortex found that the ferrets actually learned to see pretty well.

In last night's class, we started getting into the ways in which infants begin to develop language skills, and how their brains lay the groundwork for the tremendous burst of language development that will take place over the next several years. I perked right up, because one of my main reasons for taking the class is to explore my interest in speech therapy.

As part of my efforts to figure out whether I would enjoy studying speech therapy, this foundational course is all well and good. Actually doing speech therapy, however, is a pretty different animal. For that reason, I knew I would have to seek out opportunities to learn more about what it is really like to work in the field and whether the practicalities of being a speech therapist would be a fit for me.

With that in mind, I am going to spend all day tomorrow with a real live speech pathologist. Although A is not working in an area that I am particularly interested in - she works exclusively with 0 to 3 year-olds - I think it will be beneficial to pick her brain about the different types of work that are out there, her likes/dislikes, etc. Plus she is really cool.

So tomorrow I will shadow A as she visits her clients. I will have to get up a whole hour earlier than usual, but I'm thinking the adorability factor will make up for it. My co-workers are pretty cute, but who can compete with a bunch of toddlers? Speaking of adorable, here's a photo of the Amazing J, who I will have a chance to hang out with this weekend.

Look at that arm! It's like someone put a really tight rubber band around her wrist. So cute!

Last time I saw Amazing J, I wasn't sure what the correct term was for our relationship (she is my cousin's daughter). According to the Internet, she is my 'first cousin once removed,' but that sounds cumbersome and formal so I'm just going to stick to calling her Amazing J. 252 days old and counting... If any of the children tomorrow are as cute as she is, I may just have to steal one to bring home to live with me.

It's Official

I am a college student (again). There won't be any streaking in the quad, though. Not this time around.

I signed up for the Monday evening course in Human Growth and Development at Truman College. When I went to register, the place was packed, but the staff was very efficient so it still only took me about 45 minutes to go through the necessary steps of receiving my student ID number, meeting with a new student advisor, registering for the class, and making my payment.

The advisor was kind but seemed to regard me with a fair amount of skepticism. "So you already have a B.S., but you want to take CD 101 because... why?" I told him I am considering a Master's degree but need to do some exploration first, and that answer seemed to (barely) satisfy him. Maybe I just should have given him the other, equally true and relevant response, which is simply that I am interested in the subject matter and want to learn about it.

And that's really what this comes down to anyway. I feel stagnant and dissatisfied with the daily grind. And frustrated that, with the daily grind always looming, it can be hard to find the time and motivation to keep learning. So I'm taking this course largely for the sake of fresh, delicious knowledge. And also as an excuse to get a Trapper Keeper.

Once registered for the class, I had to make a payment to secure my spot. I winced (hopefully it wasn't too obvious) and handed over my visa card. "Just charge it in full, please," I sighed. Better to let go the $391 all at once. And it's as they say: If you think education is expensive, try ignorance. (I think the elusive 'they' in this case might be Derek Bok.)

Developments

For several months now, I have been talking a little and thinking a lot about going back to school. From where I sit, almost five years removed from full-time studenthood, I can enthusiastically say that I love school. And I am absolutely not too cool. When it comes to deciding where and how to go back, the first major hurdle is figuring out what I want to study. I'm sure that I am not alone in feeling that having a shallow depth of knowledge across a wide range of interests makes it difficult to set a course. But at least I have an idea:

In the last year and a half or so (and not totally unrelated to this experience), I've started to read up on and become more interested in how people learn language, the ways in which those processes might be different for different people, and how we can teach the brain to recover lost language skills and knowledge after a traumatic injury. So it sounds like maybe I should learn about speech pathology. The only problem is that I don't have any training in teaching, therapy or speech. So how to know if they are really for me? I need an affordable introductory course to test the waters.

I've looked into a couple of options, and I think the best one for me is to sign up for a class at Truman College, one of the City Colleges of Chicago. They offer fall courses in 'Language Development ' and 'Human Growth and Development' at the very attractive price of $79 per credit hour for Chicago residents. Good sign: I emailed one of the instructors in their Social Sciences Department to ask for guidance, and she responded within an hour with useful advice.

I've done my info-gathering and paid a visit to Truman. Now it's time to take the plunge. My mission for this week is to sign up for a fall class. I get a few butterflies in my stomach when I think about the fact that the first day of term is in just two and a half weeks, but then I remember that this is school we're talking about. And I love school.