No update today – I was a little tied up.

(I was alternately too sick and busy for internet writing, not to mention I really had nothing to say. I did find this when looking for my name online, though. It’s pretty awesome. Check out my rack!)

My throat is still bothering me, but I feel so much better I could almost cry:

I spoke to my boss and HR about the problem I have with the courses I’m taking, and they agree – it’s not worth my time or the company’s time if it isn’t a good fit. They’ll also let me take other courses instead, so hellooooo Technical Writing Certificate! This is such a huge relief to me – I was really afraid that they would insist I finish the program, but for all the worrying I did it was almost a non-issue: I told my boss the struggles I had last week with making the information fit for my job, and he totally understood. I can withdraw from the remainder of the program (after I finish 3102; might as well get the credit) and look into other classes instead. YAY!

Thing the second: last week I was distraught to learn that my People had submitted his resignation.  A whole barrel of personal issues had come up for him, and the end result was his needing to find a job that would allow him to work at night so he could watch his kids during the day. This was upsetting to me, because my People is a really good guy and I didn’t want him to go anywhere (or have to train yet another replacement – the 4th in a year). I did some really quick thinking, and devised a plan that would allow him to wrangle the routers in the afternoon and evening while the temp did his daytime duties. This would allow him to keep his job, our project to continue smoothly (even smoothlier, actually – he’d have time in the evening to do some serious QA), give us the leisure of finding an excellent daytime replacement, and overlap the shifts for training. My boss liked the idea, HR liked the idea, and my People was ecstatic. I gone done did a Good Thing, and that gives me a big happy!

Well, I’m getting sick. I felt the telltale tickle in my throat last night, and valiantly tried to sleep with ravaged sinuses and a pounding headache. I felt better this morning, but my germ-enhanced ride to work did little to combat the evil gathering in the delicate tissues of my breathing tubes. I don’t have time to be sick – in addition to 5 assignments for 3101, three presentations and accompanying lesson plans for 3102, my regular work schedule and a myriad of household duties, Ed is leaving for a whirlwind trip to Alberta this week. I know things could be a lot worse, but I really hate having to soldier through an illness – I don’t WANT to be a trooper, I just want to sleep.

I’m attempting to keep an ongoing log detailing the Ways the 2010 Olympics Have Interfered with My Life, but so far it’s an empty list. I can’t imagine it’ll stay this way for long – this morning was our first sample of Olympic-style traffic, and it was pretty horrific. It wasn’t the Olympics fault though; last night’s wind storm did a number on the city and bridges were affected by trees and accidents. It WAS my first experience with busses being so full they won’t pick up passengers – not really a big deal, except we’re the first stop immediately after the depot. When we finally got on a bus, we played a smell round of CRAM! and suffered untold indignities on the steamy ride into town. Naturally, now that we’re safe and dry indoors, the sun has come out. This is going to be a hell of a couple of months.

I need to go to the drug store for drugs. I need to talk to my boss about how much school is a pile of suck. I want to do neither of these things.

Being back in the office is so much better than being in class. Tomorrow we get hot dogs! Hot dogs to help ORPHANS!

Today I went to the fancy flea market (not to be confused with the perpetual flea market on Terminal – this is the one held every couple months at the Croatian Cultural Centre) and scored some neat things:

6 small pretty green bowls and a matching big pretty green bowl

so shiny

a set of four tins for storing dry goods - perhaps i will fill them with candy

hand-e massage vibrator !!!!

it has many attachments

for treatment of ...

buy canadian!

look how relaxed they are

Hooray!

Someone got hit by a car in the intersection right outside my house this morning. It sucked. I don’t think it was fatal – I saw the victim moving her arms while talking to ambulance folk – but it’s still scary to see someone lying on the ground in obvious distress. She wasn’t jaywalking but at the crosswalk, and was hit by a van turning left onto Hastings from a side street.

I am sorry – this is one of the tackiest things I’ve ever said – but she was hit by a van that said “DISASTERS HAPPEN” in huge letters across the side, and that is almost funny. It’s something that would happen to me, and I would delight in the irony.

I do hope she is okay, even if I am a horrible person.

School is hard, and I don’t know if it’s right for me.

I don’t shy away from hard things – I welcome them with open pants – but there’s a lot to be said for taking a step back and looking at the Big Picture. Sometimes admitting that something is wrong actually harder than quitting, and this is one of those times.

I don’t want to quit this course. It’s only been four days. I can see the value in what I’m learning. Yes, the material is very advanced – but that’s not a problem; I’m smart. I enjoy a challenge.

And I don’t want to be a teacher.

The program I’m taking (at the advice of my boss) is the Provincial Instructor Diploma Program at Vancouver Community College. The program is designed for people who want to teach adult learners, and can be a stepping stone for those wanting to get their Master Degree in Education. It’s an intensive program with six courses and a practicum, and it’s very detailed.

I am not a teacher. I don’t want to be a teacher. I don’t consider myself a teacher – my job is that of a technical trainer, and to me there is a world of difference. I am not building a curriculum for students; I am passing along procedural and technical information. I don’t have the luxury of a 30-hour course designed to cover one topic; I cover what must be shared and move on to the next item. I don’t evaluate my students – hell, I don’t even have students. I don’t have to be conscious of why my participants are taking my “course” – they’re learning the procedure or software or system because it’s their job.

I do see some value in what I’m learning – ways to engage the learner, for example. Getting their attention and making them care why they’re learning the topic. The rest of it, though .. it’s brutally hard to try and see how it would be applicable in the real world; the world that pays my bills. Outlining a curriculum that I could actually use at work? Building a lesson plan that promotes interactive learning and student participation? How do you do that when your topic isn’t “welding a miter joint” but “changes to a network outage procedure”? When the very nature of your job is procedural and does not invite debate or discussion or even learner activities?

I don’t know that I’ll find the answers in time, or at all. I don’t know that this is the right place for me. I am a trainer, not a teacher. This course isn’t for people like me – but is that my hopelessness speaking, or is it the honest truth? Am I giving up too early; chickening out – or is my assessment true? How much time can I funnel into something that has no (as far as I can tell) practical application for me?

I don’t know what to do. I would be angry at myself if I gave up too soon, but at what point do your reasons for doing so outweigh the fear or failure?

If it makes any difference, VCC also offers a Business and Technical Writing Certificate that I really want to take. It’s not a diploma, but I’m fairly certain I can live without one of those seeing as I’ve done so quite admirably since not graduating high school.

What’s the bigger issue: that you’ve bitten off more than you can chew, or that you’re chewing concrete? Yes, the mouthful is large – but you’re trying to eat the inedible. What’s more pressing? The magnitude or the content?

You know, I’ve never dropped out of anything before.

My laptop erased my homework.

It doesn’t sound like a big deal, until I mention that my work was written out in pen and my laptop erased it.

I went a little crazy buying school supplies when I realized I had exactly one working pen and no highlighters. Among the writing instruments I purchased were a couple of neat looking pens (if your idea of “neat” stopped evolving at the dawn of the tribal tattoo) in such professional colours as Electric Purple and Complicated Green. The pens bring the fancy; they’re erasable. What a time to be alive!

It’s been a long time since I was last in school, and erasable pen technology has come far. Long gone are the “erasable” pens that work by sanding away your mistake along with the top layer of paper – they’ve been replaced with high-tech nubbins that gently remove all trace of your stupidity while leaving your notebook intact. It’s a magical process, using friction and voodoo to clean up the messes you leave behind. It even says so on the pen, right under the barbwire design that would not look out of place tattoo’d on the muscle-bound arm of an enormous douchebag: remove by friction.

Too bad it’s all a lie.

After a particularly grueling lesson on crap I will never use, I was horrified to discover almost half my brilliant work had been erased. It was as though someone had taken one of these fancy witchcraft friction pens to it, removing a good chunk of the DACUM chart I had literally slaved over for hours. How could this have happened?! There was no friction here; I was as unchafed as a maiden from the old country. Where did my writen work go?!

It was then that I realized that friction is little more than heat; a manual way of producing the same heat currently wafting out of my trusty Macbook. The laptop was on and had been set aside on top of my binder, on the very page that I had writen an excellent start to my most loathed project. This heat had simulated the same provided by friction, and the end result was my work disappearing before my eyes. TRICKERY! The devil himself had risen from the underworld to tamper with my dissertation on CRM!

I was pissed. I hate this class, and I don’t want to redo my work. The erasable pen is a good idea, but if something as harmless as a little heat can obliterate your work, a warning might be nice. Do they need a good technical writer? I know where they can find one cheap.

Fucking pen. Looks like I’ll be doing homework – on the computer – all weekend long.

Jerks.

• “Oh boy, free soup!”
• *burns tongue* “Ow! This is hot!”
• *spills soup* “Gee, I sure suck at soup!”
• *cleans up mess*
• “Okay, let’s see if I can eat the rest of my lunch without spilling it everywhere.”
• *drops carrot down shirt*
• “.. fuck.”

I’m in two courses right now. 3101 sucks and I kind of hate it – if it wasn’t a 1-week course that will be done by Friday at 4pm, I would drop it. That is how much I hate it.

On the other hand, 3102 is so far hilarious:

she gave us smelly markers and told us to "draw a symbol that represents you". i wanted to draw genitals; thought better of it.

well, shit. there go my ideas for this class.

hey, she asked.

I am utterly stalling – I do not want to go to school today. BOOOOOOO 3101 I HATE YOU.

The student wireless at VCC is so bad I had to tether my iPhone to check my work email. This smells – I miss the Internet and being connected to the world. Also, there are dogs everywhere and I can’t pet them (they’re seeing eye dogs) and that just sucks.

I start my second course tonight at 5:30, shortly after my day class ends. I hope this other course will be more useful than 3101 – it’s good, but I’m not a teacher. Everyone else in the class is a teacher with actual students and courses and a curriculum, whereas I’m a corporate trainer – a huge distinction in my mind. Also, I don’t WANT to be a teacher. I have hopes the other 5 courses plus practicum will be more useful, but right now I feel like I’m wasting my time.

I think I’ll look into the business and technical writing certificate. That’s what I want to do when I grow up, so I might as well get certified on someone else’s dime.

I wish my program gave out coveralls.