Waiting for my next class to start. I’m in a smaller lecture hall this time, but the seats are *awesome*. Going to have to figure out how to hold my laptop without dropping him in lecture though. At the moment I have him on my lap with the neoprene case acting as a leveler. Not bad, but definitely not ideal. I have visions of dropping my laptop and boom, bye-bye lots and lots of money. Paranoia is such fun.

I’m wondering how they’re going too fit nearly 200 people in this room though. I have the sneaking suspicion that I’m going to be sharing elbow space with someone. I have a far too huge personal bubble. I think I’ve decided to sit at the front of class from here on in at this point, it’s easier for me to get the room I want, I can record the prof more clearly, and most importantly, less people around me. Ew, people.

I hope the fog sticks around today. Last night on the way home from the gym, I was exhausted but so, so wanting to go on a photo shoot with my film camera and my new shiny tripod. I’ve wanted to do long night exposures for several years now. Just never had the tripod, but now that’s been solved. If it’s nice and foggy tonight again I’ll go take the shots I missed last night.

I think I’m going to do class then go home to work on my stuff from yesterday. I kind of let the bare essentials slide, which means I now have to do a full hour today to catch up. Whee, It’s kind of sad how much work I need to do to make up for some fucknut’s brilliant idea of “whole language”. Whole language, my ass. I have a fundamental lack of knowledge when it comes to grammar and how it works. I can obviously manage on a casual level, but that’s no longer good enough.

So it’s a goal this year too make up for what I’m missing. I’m counting on my ability to learn quickly here. That’s a bit naive, though. How can I reasonably expect too make up for 12 years of “grammar BAD!” within a year? Is this an expectation I can fulfill? We’ll see.

One of the big things I have to work on is my defensive reaction to being corrected. The lovely young woman that works in he WLU writing center pointed out how weak my sentence structure is. (and that right there is bad, I know it’s bad, I don’t know why or how to change my sentence so it doesn’t end with is) My reaction to that obvious, known fact being pointed out was shame and feeling like an idiot. I guess I expect that I should have known all this automatically.

So on one hand I condemn “whole language” for being a bullshit method of education, and on the other I still expect it to have worked. Unreasonable. Another little thing to add to my copious list of things to work on. Acceptance that through no fault of my own, I wasn’t given the tools to excel here. Accept that it’s a challenge to overcome and it doesn’t make me stupid or an idiot. I’m not sure if I can. It makes me question myself, question the years gone into writing for this journal. I thought I was a skilled writer… but how can I be skilled if I have no clue how a sentence is well constructed?

And that’s a rough 30 minutes and time for class to begin shortly. That is if the prof ever shows up. :)