Well, I did my medical terminology quiz today, and I think I aced it. We’ll see.
My “foundations of TCOM” class was split up into three teams. Two debated the place of rhetoric in technical communications, while my team acted as judges and were supposed to do a presentation on the history of technical writing. I’m glad that I wasn’t on either of the debate teams, since 1) I had more than enough debate in high school (I was on the team); and 2) I haven’t had the required rhetoric class yet.
I somehow got appointed to stand up and give the final decision, anyway—which was that the two teams had been split up over a false dichotomy, pitting traditional rhetorical methods against more task-related communication styles. There’s a place for both. I honestly think the professor was pleased that we didn’t pick winners and losers.
We didn’t get time to do the presentation, so it’ll be done on Tuesday. To be more specific, I’ll most likely be doing it Tuesday. There were five people on my team. One was absent when the assignment was made. One has a very heavy Kenyan accent (I mean VERY heavy). One is a very young freshman who got the info on the timeline handout WRONG (so I’ll be redoing that, too, but I need to find a gentle way to point out the problems to her). The other person could do a perfectly good job, but he’s very, very quiet and just doesn’t like to speak in front of people.
When I got home, the team supervisor from the data entry company was here installing stuff on my computer (under Sam’s supervision). I helped her figure out the settings for Citrix and changed things back to my preferred FTP program instead of the one she’d installed, just sticking in the settings for their server. I have an employee number, and should be able to start keying in batches by tomorrow morning! It’s a temporary thing, but hey, I’ll take it.
I have a bunch of reading to do, an essay to write that’ll serve as a quiz grade, another chapter of the medical terminology book to learn, some project management stuff for the web design team to do, one graphics project to do, and another to revise.
Dr. Hopper, who teaches the medical communications class, sorta chided me for having too heavy a schedule. I’m not sure how to take that. I’m taking a normal full load, four classes, 12 semester hours. I think the fact that all four classes are in my major is part of why he considered that too much‐there’s no “blow-off” course in there. I don’t have any room in my college years for blow-off courses, okay? I mean, whenever I take the speech course, I expect it to be pretty easy. Other than that, there’s not really any fluff.
I only HAVE to take six hours to be a full-time student, due to the whole disability thing—but I’d rather get done with the degree sooner if at all possible. And I’m going to pay the same tuition whether I take 6 or 12 or more hours, so why not? I guess we’ll see how my grades are at the end of this semester. If I maintain an A average, I may add more hours next semester.
I had this weird thought while doing my morning pages—I’d like a psychology minor. That isn’t offered at my school. I don’t know where it came from. But I want one anyway. So now I’ll go about figuring out how to do it.
