Dusty Springfield hits home.

Well, I'm not the only one in the family that got a Master's Degree this year. My older brother's wife graduated with a Master's in Divinity from the Salt Lake Theological Seminary today. It's been a long haul for her too, and it's cool to be having the two of us get a degree at the same time. Congratulations! (And congrats on the A+ on the paper too!)

So, I have another preacher in the family. Which brought on a post by Naptime Nostalgia that made me laugh. (In case you were not aware, Naptime Nostalgia is my nephew's wife) Click on the picture if you want to see her post, and make sense of the title.

I'm done!

It's official, I now have my Master's degree.  Went up around 12:30, had to park at Rice Stadium and walk across campus to Kingsbury Hall.  Met at the stairs with a bunch of the other people in my cohort to get pictures (I didn't bring my camera so I'm hoping I can get copies from them).  I saw my two brothers and their wives as I walked in, my older brother yelled my nickname (Slim).  My sister and her husband were there also, although I didn't see them and didn't find out they were there until later.  But it's great knowing they were all there for me.  Love you guys!  My dad's a professor there, in the Math department not the Education department, but since he's working closely these days with the Education department they invited him to sit up on stage and hand me my diploma.  That was kind of cool, having my father hug me in front of everyone as he gave me the diploma case.  (Diploma comes in the mail later).  Me, Jo and Lani all sat together through the whole thing, which was really nice since Lani's family gave her several candy lei's so we had munchies throughout the ceremony.  But mostly since we had helped and encouraged each other over the last 2 years, it was nice to be right there with them for the ceremony.

Anyway, it's over.  My dad asked me if I was going to go for a PhD.  I told him that since there was 16 years between my Bachelor's and my Master's, I had at least a decade to decide.

WHEW!

2 years of work wrapped up in a 15 minute presentation - and that included the Q&A period.  I'm done, I watched them sign the papers as they congradulated me.  I can't beleive it's over, yet I feel unnervingly relaxed anyway.  Thanks for listening and commenting and all the support over the last 2 years.  WHEW! I'm done.

One down, one to go.

Presentation #1 a success.  And I'm all ready for tomorrow.  24 hours from now I'll be a Master of Education!

Me n ppt 4 eva

It's been a week and a half of PowerPoint presentations.  I spent 40+ hours on the presentation to the school board, and right after that I find out that I have to produce one for each of my classes this semester.  Yup, two more.  I have to present to my Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) class the process I went through to refine my Capstone Project, to find errors and problems with navigating the web site.  I also get to defend my Capstone Project to a panel of professors for my Master's degree, kind of like defending a thesis paper.  Fun schtuff.  The good news is that I have the web site AND the two presentations DONE!  (Wanna check out the final project, just click Capstone Project.)  I do still have two papers to finish, one I haven't even started, but at least I'm ready to present for both classes.  Yea!  That relieves about 33.427% of the stress I'm under these days.

Grad-gee-a-shun.

This is it.  The final stretch.  The light at the end of the tunnel.  The 9th inning.  The 18th hole.  The winter of my content.  However you want to put it.  We went and picked up our graduation duds yesterday on the way to class.  Cost a lot less than I was expecting - $76 bucks, and that included extra for the red doohickey around my neck and a U of U Alumni license plate frame.  Now I just have to decide which car it's going to go on.

Gangsta-teen dating game goes mobile on Trax, details at 11.

I'm done. Presentation complete, ate food, said our goodbyes and left for the semester. Only one more semester left for my Master's degree. Yippee!

There may be a low pressure full of precipitation heading toward the state, but a psycho front hit the valley yesterday afternoon. One of the most eventful commutes up to the U yet. I can't even remember all the specific events, but the best one was the Teen-mom bachelorettes.

4 boys got on the train at the 21st South station, obvious gang wannabes, 15 maybe 16 years old. I just look over at my fellow teacher and say "Awww, how cute, a gaggle of little baby gangstas." The head larva has one of those hoodies that zip up and and has a creepy face on the hood, with cutouts for the eyes. He looks around for a while trying desperately to get a reaction from somebody, to no avail. Just a couple minutes after taking it off, this skinny little girl (we think) walks by and goes up to king larva and tells him that her friend thinks he's cute and wants his phone number. "Things ain't so down lately, got no cell." he tells her. She walks back past and goes to where a couple of teen-moms are rocking their babies at the front of the train and talks to the blond teen-mom. My friend looks over at me and says, as if talking to larvae boy, "She's got a kid, run, man, run!" Girlfriend goes back and forth a few more times trying to talk the boy into being interested in blond teen mom. Somewhere around the 9th South station, when teen-mom sees this is going nowhere she gets desperate and yells to him, across the full length of the Trax train "and I'm a Jugallette". Jump on it my friend, gangsta teen mom. What more could you ask for. Fortunately our stop was the next stop, because we were at the point that we were bound to say something, loud enough to get us shanked. I would have loved to be there for the last segment of the show. "Ok larvae-boy, time to choose. Will it be gangsta teen-mom #1, gangsta teen-mom #2 or the gender unspecific friend gangsta non-mom #3?" "Well, Wink, I think I'll choose........"

This is it folks.

Next week is the last week of the semester for me at the U. I've just submitted the paper for my Leadership class and our group has everything done for our Instructional Design class. All that is left is to show up for class, do the presentations for the project in each class and then sit back and listen to everyone else's presentations. Yippee!

This means ONLY ONE MORE SEMESTER LEFT! It also means a pay raise. Yup, I'll have 24 more semester credits under my belt since I made the Bachelor's+20 pay scale, and that'll push me up to the Bachelor's+40 level. And if all goes well, by the end of April I'll have my Master's degree. Whew! 80% of the way through.

Summa semestah is ova.

I am now officially 60% of the way through my Master's program. I've taken classes on instructional design, educational psychology, educational use of the internet and how to rip apart research study reports. Summer sememter was all using computer programs; Flash, Fireworks, Dreamweaver and Photoshop. It was a lot of fun, and a lot of frustration, and I learned a lot of things. Both of the classes had final projects that were a combination of creativity and use of the programs. In the class we learned to use Macromedia Flash I made a Flash introduction for my personal web page. If you got to this page through http://www.srossi.net/, then you've already seen it. If you came straight to laduanta.blogspot.com, then it'll be new for you;

The midterm for the same class was to do an advertisement for anything we wanted to, and I built on a joke website I did years ago - and advertisement for our property up in Duchesne;

My final project for the other class was to develop a curricular based web site. Here is the picture from the front page of the site, just click on it to see the whole site.

Overall, I'm kind of proud of these things I produced. I've been amazed at how much I learned over the last year, and how relatively easy it was; I expected it to be a lot harder. What I am afraid of is that the first year is all the easy(er) stuff, and that it's going to get really hard for the last 2 semesters. Wish me luck, I hope I survive. But at least I get the next 3 weeks off - no college, no school. Yippee!

It's Official

I got my "Official Letter of Acceptance" from the University of Utah today. I am now officially a U of U student, specifically in the Masters of Education program, starting this fall. And the even better news is that Gibb was also admitted, so we're going to be going through the program together. It's been a long time since I was a student, I"m looking forward to all night study sessions, midterms & finals and the best thing of all - student loans! Yeah. The program is designed for teachers who will still be teaching, I'll have two classes a week in the evenings, and it's project based, so I won't have a whole lot of tests. I'm still hoping on getting the scholarship I applied for, so even the money part might not be an issue. But no matter what, I'm planning on having some fun with it, and it'll help me with my STS position with the district.

GRE! GRE! Man I'm glad I'm done with the GRE!

4 hours my aching butt - Started at 3:30 and I was done by 6:00. And they did let you out for bathroom breaks, although I got the feeling that if you wanted to go every 15 minutes they'd say no - but once or twice throughout the test is ok. I had to lock everything in a locker out front before going into the testing room, they gave me 2 pencils and 5 pages of scratch paper and I had to keep my ID on the desk where the guy walking around the room could make sure I was still me. I had to sign in and put down the time when I entered, when I went to pee, when I came back from peeing and when I left. Oh, and I had to show him my ID each time too. Man, they wanted to make sure I was taking my own test. But I guess I did pretty good. It gives you the scored at the end of the test - for the Language and Quantative parts, not the essays - and since I'm not allowed to keep my scratch paper (I might give away some secrets I wrote on there) as I was copying my scores onto a post-it note he gave me he said I got pretty good scores. 540 on the language part and 780 on the quantative (that means Math) part. He said the 780 is almost a perfect score, which is good since I taught Math for 13 out of the last 14 years. Anyway - enough bragging. My mind is brain dead and it's time to veg out to CSI, the 2nd season. Have a good one.

GRE! GRE! GRE! WE got the GRE today!

Yup, in a little over 4 hours I'll be starting a 4 hour test, basically to see if I will crack up during a 4 hour test or if I can survive it. It's the Graduate Record Examination, something I have to take for the Graduate program I've been accepted to. It's basically set up so that you'll fail - the more questions you answer correctly, the harder the questions get. Flunk 'em all and you'll end up with questions like 2+2=? or Cat is to Meow as Cow is to ? Yeah, this is gonna be fun!

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On a lighter side, here's a bunch of "Motivational Posters" that we found on the internet. Some of them are the Star Trek ones that I mentioned before, some use foul language, but all are pretty funny. Check 'em out HERE.