Tag: College

General Update

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2010-09-02

10:38 pm

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College, Family, Health

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It has been some time since I post­ed much here, so I fig­ure that I should do a bit of an update. It isn’t as if any­thing has changed in any big way. Sam has the same nice and sta­ble job, and we’re still very hap­pi­ly togeth­er after—oh, wow, it’s twelve years this month.

Katie is a col­lege stu­dent now, and still liv­ing at home (I’m very hap­py about that!) since she decid­ed to attend a local school. Her health issues haven’t gone away, but she’s try­ing so very hard—I wor­ry about her con­stant­ly. She push­es and push­es until she col­laps­es every day and at the end of every week. She has a very active social life (what do you expect? she’s a babe!), and hap­pi­ly she has a great group of friends who are sup­port­ive about help­ing her get to class when nei­ther she nor I dri­ve.

One of the class­es she was sup­posed to take (French) was can­celed due to inad­e­quate enroll­ment. She was ter­ri­bly unhap­py, and I was a lit­tle dis­ap­point­ed because I was look­ing for­ward to help­ing her with the sub­ject. On the oth­er hand, it was an 8am class, and with­out it her ear­li­est class is much lat­er in the day. I think it worked out for the best for this semes­ter.

I’ve had anoth­er nui­sance come up with my own health, too. Annoy­ing bod­ies. They’re great when you want to taste choco­late, hug some­one, smell flow­ers, etc. but I have some com­plains about a few design flaws.

That’s enough for tonight. Tomor­row: More about Art!

Another week, another 1/4 semester

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2008-01-20

11:40 pm

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College, Education, Family, Fun, Health

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I’ve suc­cess­ful­ly com­plet­ed 1/4 of the semes­ter! With­out using any kind of accom­mo­da­tions!

I real­ize that’s a fair­ly piti­ful thing to cel­e­brate, but I have to take what I can get.

The project man­age­ment course is actu­al­ly giv­ing me use­ful expe­ri­ence using MS Project, along with infor­ma­tion that is applic­a­ble in the “real world.” There’s also a ridicu­lous amount of ver­biage that I’ve nev­er heard used in the work­place, but maybe there’s been some sort of PM rev­o­lu­tion since 2000. I doubt it, but it’s pos­si­ble.
Con­tin­ue read­ing “Anoth­er week, anoth­er 1/4 semes­ter” →

Homeschooling High School in College?

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2008-01-19

7:53 pm

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College, Homeschooling, Online Education

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It’s be SO long since I updat­ed things here! Not that I think any­body real­ly missed me, but still, I should have kept it up a bit bet­ter.

Katie tried attend­ing a good high school near us, and loved it. She got great grades, was cho­sen to work on the year­book (it’s a very com­pet­i­tive process there), and was even made the chief pho­tog­ra­ph­er right away! She was also get­ting involved in oth­er activ­i­ties, and she made some good friends. She real­ly loved the art class­es, in par­tic­u­lar.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, her health suf­fered. She has severe rest­less leg syn­drome, fibromyal­gia (which caus­es sleep prob­lems), and tru­ly hor­rif­ic migraines in addi­tion to being aller­gic to all kinds of things. The migraines aren’t well-man­aged any more, so that she has a migraine almost every day despite tak­ing Trilep­tal as a pre­ven­tive. She’s had to use her res­cue med­i­cine so much that it’s no longer very help­ful, either. She just can’t get any decent sleep, thanks to the RLS and fibro, which means that she needs a min­i­mum of ten to twelve hours every night, and still wakes up unrest­ed. And our insur­ance has gone stu­pid, repeat­ed­ly refus­ing to cov­er her aller­gy med­ica­tions, in par­tic­u­lar. 1 Right now, they’re refus­ing to cov­er Provig­il, which was the only thing keep­ing her awake enough to even con­sid­er attend­ing school. She’s under doc­tor’s orders to stop dri­ving until the sleep sit­u­a­tion is ame­lio­rat­ed, and has been for some time, so she’s been delayed in learn­ing to dri­ve and get­ting her license.

So she’s back at home, which is a real dis­ap­point­ment to her. We’ve decid­ed to try mak­ing the best of it, and focus on the good things. For instance, she’s no longer held back to any­one else’s learn­ing pace, and she does­n’t have to jump through bureau­crat­ic hoops. She can learn when­ev­er she is awake, hon­or­ing her body’s need for more sleep than most peo­ple.

She wants to take col­lege class­es online, which is how I’m man­ag­ing to con­tin­ue my edu­ca­tion despite health prob­lems. I think it’s a good idea, so now we’re con­sid­er­ing schools and mon­ey. While the Uni­ver­si­ty sys­tem schools here in Geor­gia tech­ni­cal­ly have all their core class­es online, the real­i­ty when I attend­ed South­ern Poly was that the entire school usu­al­ly had only one or two seats for any par­tic­u­lar course, and of course those seats were tak­en imme­di­ate­ly.

We’d love to hear about the expe­ri­ences of any oth­er home­schooled teens who are fin­ish­ing high school in col­lege, par­tic­u­lar­ly those who are tak­ing class­es online.

Her even­tu­al goal is art school, and while there is a local school that has an online pro­gram, I just don’t see how it’s pos­si­ble to learn some things through the inter­net. Nei­ther does she. So we’re also look­ing for good art class­es to sup­ple­ment what­ev­er she does online. We’re in Decatur, and since nei­ther she nor I are dri­ving, close is good. MARTA acces­si­bil­i­ty is absolute­ly nec­es­sary!

1 hey insist that every­body should be just fine with Clar­itin, which is avail­able over-the-counter. Not so!

Katie, Me and Schools

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2007-01-02

3:36 pm

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Public School

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Well, we’re wait­ing for Katie’s final grades for fall semes­ter while enjoy­ing win­ter break for both of us. We had Sam home for the first half of our breaks with us, but unfor­tu­nate­ly work­ing for a school isn’t quite as lux­u­ri­ous as being a stu­dent.

Katie has had most­ly As in her progress reports across the term, so I expect that should be what we see on her report card. We’re work­ing on an alge­bra refresh­er/wrap-up here at home, as she’ll be going into geom­e­try at school when she goes back next week. I don’t hon­est­ly recall using a great deal of alge­bra in geom­e­try, do you? Of course, I absolute­ly loathed geom­e­try and nev­er “got it” to any real extent. This does­n’t bode well for home­work help this semes­ter.

She has tru­ly loved her art class. While she has had more access to art sup­plies at home than I ever had in school or out­side it, and I’ve tak­en her to a fair num­ber of muse­ums and tried to give her some ground­ing in art his­to­ry, I’m no artist. She’s learned more in that one art class than I could have ever taught her, and she’s hun­gry for more. So hun­gry! I should have giv­en her access to art class­es ear­li­er, obvi­ous­ly — but hind­sight is 20/20. She wants to take sum­mer school class­es this year, and I’m even more in favor of it if it means she can con­tin­ue her pur­suit of art.

I’ve already got­ten my grades. The fan­tas­tic sup­port I’ve got­ten from Sam and Katie made it pos­si­ble for me to get As in both of my cours­es for the first half of fall semes­ter. The sec­ond half of fall semes­ter (Devry does things odd­ly) starts on 8 Jan­u­ary. I’m tak­ing all my cours­es online again, as that works bet­ter for the fam­i­ly and my ridicu­lous body.

Oh, I near­ly for­got! We got the results back from Katie’s first PSAT. She did­n’t do so great in the math, which isn’t sur­pris­ing, not hav­ing had any geom­e­try yet. She did­n’t do too bad­ly on it either—84th per­centile, some­thing like that, as I recall. She ran out of time on that sec­tion. She was in the mid to upper 90s on every­thing else. We were a bit con­cerned, because the coun­selor at the high school could­n’t be arsed to get Katie’s accom­mo­da­tions in place in time for the test, but obvi­ous­ly it turned out quite well any­way. The accom­mo­da­tions will be in place and she will have passed geom­e­try before she takes it “for real” next fall, when it counts as the Nation­al Mer­it Schol­ar­ship Qual­i­fy­ing Test.

Well, back to “stor­ing up” sleep and tak­ing pic­tures of every­thing, most espe­cial­ly spoiled lit­tle Kiyoshi the solar-pow­ered cat. I miss spend­ing this much time with Katie on a dai­ly basis. It was much nicer, but she does love her school. She is obvi­ous­ly ener­gized by the aca­d­e­m­ic dis­course, even by dis­agree­ing with an annoy­ing teacher. She was ready to try out her wings, and we had a good school near­by where she could do so. I’m glad we could go back to home­school­ing if we chose to or need­ed to do so, but I’m glad the fledg­ling’s flight is going so well, too.

School update

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2006-12-10

10:54 pm

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College

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School is going along fine. In fact, anoth­er semes­ter is almost done for me, and Katie’s almost at the end of her semes­ter, too. She’s kick­ing ass and tak­ing names. Now that she’s set­tled aca­d­e­m­i­cal­ly, she’s stretch­ing out into some extracur­ric­u­lar stuff and mak­ing more friends. We’ve man­aged to con­nect with a Girl Scout troop, (final­ly!) despite sil­ly paper­work slip-ups.

I think I need to rearrange my class­es for the next part of the semes­ter (I’m already reg­is­tered), but this unit’s class­es are going very well, and I’ve actu­al­ly learned use­ful (in one class) and inter­est­ing (in the oth­er class) stuff.

I had told the school when they ini­tial­ly did my tran­script eval­u­a­tion that I did­n’t have as many upper-lev­el cred­its as they said I had, but they insist­ed that I’d done my major work and would­n’t real­ly lis­ten. Weird­ness­es kept com­ing up, and I kept push­ing about things like the Hope Schol­ar­ship not com­ing up in my finan­cial aid pack­age. Some­one final­ly said, “Oh — you aren’t eli­gi­ble because you already have a bach­e­lor’s degree.”

What? Um, no. You see, I’m in the Bach­e­lor’s Degree Com­ple­tion Pro­gram because I don’t have a bach­e­lor’s degree yet. Capiche?

Well, it seems that when Mer­cer Uni­ver­si­ty sent over my tran­scripts, they could­n’t man­age to just pull the tran­scripts for Cyn­thia Rober­son (my name when I attend­ed that school) with my Social Secu­ri­ty Num­ber and my Mer­cer Stu­dent ID. No, they also sent over Cyn­thia Armis­tead­’s tran­script — some­one whose name was Cyn­thia Armis­tead when she attend­ed Mer­cer and got a bach­e­lor’s degree, some­one with a dif­fer­ent SSN and MSI and mid­dle ini­tial. And instead of notic­ing these dis­crep­an­cies, my school blithe­ly entered this tran­script in and gave me cred­it for her work!

So there’s been a whole big deal about get­ting all of my tran­scripts again, and re-eval­u­at­ing them anew, and chang­ing my planned class­es to reflect the results. I’m get­ting two sorts of atti­tude from the bureau­crats I have to deal with in straight­en­ing out this non­sense: peo­ple who obvi­ous­ly think I should have shut up and tak­en the cred­its, and peo­ple who think I was try­ing to pull a fast one (hence the busi­ness about them get­ting all my tran­scripts again, direct­ly from my old schools) and re-eval­u­at­ing them).

For­tu­nate­ly, the class­es I’ve tak­en so far are class­es I need­ed to take. Yay. The class­es that start in a cou­ple of weeks are in ques­tion, so I need to talk to my so-called “advi­sor” about them. The “advi­sor” is the per­son who deals with every­body who is in the bach­e­lor’s degree com­ple­tion pro­gram. She does­n’t do indi­vid­ual advis­ing, real­ly. She does­n’t give a fly­in’ flip about me or my plans, abil­i­ties, back­ground, etc. She meets with stu­dents once, when they enter the pro­gram. That’s it. That’s the plan. She does­n’t want to see us again. She’s not hap­py that she’s had to talk to me more than once.

I was just way spoiled by my mar­velous advi­sor at South­ern Poly, Dr. Mark Stevens. Nobody else can live up to that stan­dard. But this woman should­n’t have the same title. She’s a paper­work-stam­per.

I’m actu­al­ly enjoy­ing the data­base por­tion of my cur­rent business/computer course so much that I’m look­ing at which tech­ni­cal con­cen­tra­tion in the bach­e­lor’s degree com­ple­tion major would give me the most oppor­tu­ni­ty to go deep­er into the top­ic.

Oh — with the oth­er per­son­’s bach­e­lor’s degree tran­script, I had some­thing like 91 trans­fer cred­its. That’s the max­i­mum you’re allowed to trans­fer into the school. With­out her tran­script, just using my cred­its, I’m com­ing in with 79 cred­its. The sci­ence class I’m tak­ing now should have been my last “core” class, but this school counts “Sci­ence, Tech­nol­o­gy and Soci­ety as a 400 lev­el class. The STS class I took at South­ern Poly was a 200 lev­el class. So one more core class, some busi­ness and man­age­ment stuff required for my major, and then the tech­ni­cal con­cen­tra­tion cours­es. Three full semes­ters, at least, maybe four, since there may be pre­req­ui­sites required for some of the tech­ni­cal con­cen­tra­tion class­es that I don’t have yet.

That’s not too bad — just anoth­er year of school, real­ly. Wow. I can see the end.