Agotada, or, Why This grumpy girl feels her MA is worth a little more than some others at this university

Happy NaBloPoMo. You get to hear from me every day for the next 30. I don't think every entry will be as gruñon as this one is shaping up to be.

I got here (my office, that is) at 5:45am, which is early even for a madrugadora like me. Last night I stayed at my parents' so that I could take them to the airport at O'dark:30 this morning to catch a plane to Kentucky. They're going out to visit my brother's family. This includes the new baby. I am jealous, not just for the few days' escape to some different scenery, but for seeing the baby. I'm not known for ever experiencing excitement over babies, and I had a hard time getting into my sister-in-law's pregnancy. I was certainly very happy for her, but we're not as close as we probably ought to be, and she already had plenty of other female relatives and friends hovering over her and we live in different states and I'm busy and blah blah blah, I just didn't participate in the pregnancy rituals. I've felt a little disconnected from the whole process--not in a bad way, just disconnected. However, as soon as the baby was born I was unexpectedly rushed by a mostly inexplicable thrill, and I am dying to meet this baby. I want to poke her in the tummy. When I call my brother, sometimes I can here the baby in the background screaming in that mashed-cat way that newborns do, and it makes me smile and laugh because it's cute (also because it's them and not me that she's depriving of sleep). This is good. This gives me hope that I won't feel indifference toward my own hypothetical children in their infant stage. I am really, really looking forward to meeting her. My brother and his wife and the baby are coming out in a couple of weeks, and in some moments I find myself struggling to focus my work because my mind is wandering to my niece. I've never even met her, so how can I like her this much already? Must be a blood thing.

But I digress. I got here even earlier than usual (I am still the only one in the offices, except for someone banging around two floors up) and sat down to the dreary task of finishing my horrid, horrid phonetics homework. I serendipitously checked my email before I started, and found much to my delight that most of the rest of the class has also had complications with the assignment and that the deadline is extended to Monday (I'm delight about the Monday bit, not the shared exasperation. I'm not that nasty). I don't want to draw this out any longer than I have to, but this means I have time to get help with doing statistics in Excel. I hate this class. Yesterday I told my husband that I couldn't remember the last time I hated a class this much, but this morning I recalled. It wasn't undergrad stats, it wasn't Philosophy 101 taught by an angry unmedicated jerk prone to ranting in Greek. The last time I had a professor this unreasonable and out-of-touch and assignments this ridiculous, was my sophomore year at BYU when I took the first of three required semesters of anthropological theory. I was nineteen, and it was my first time coming up against material that heady, and one of the profs (it was team-taught in sections by five members of the faculty) was an outspoken, arrogant misogynist who gave us what then seemed like (to my undergrad self) excessive work that was not part of the established curriculum. As a group we complained to the department chair. He shrugged it off, dismissing it with "yeah, he's like that, but don't worry, I've got the say on final grades and I'll make sure none of your grades suffer because of him". This phonetics course is bad in slightly different ways. The professor communicates poorly, lectures vaguely and gives us poorly planned and poorly explained assignments, but she's a nice person and generally approachable (though I teach during the time she usually holds office hours). The workload is fine as far as quantity, but lately it's unclear exactly what the assignment is. The administration of the last exam was thoroughly botched. It was a transcription exam-- heavy on the listening, that is-- and around half of the recordings were nearly inaudible. I don't want you to get the impression that I'm lazy, because I'm not. But I am tired, and I'm worried about my grade, and I feel like the other members of the class are whiners (pure hypocrisy, I know). Here's my main gripe: They are required to do half the work I do, and they're not required to do all that great a job at it, and in the end we all get MA's from CU. Huh? Here's why: I am not officially a part of the linguistics department, I am a part of the Spanish department. Therefore, I am "expected" to take three seminars each semester, and I'm "expected" to teach one five-credit course each semester ("expected" in quotes because these are official requirements of first-year MA students only, but they are de facto requirements of those of us in the second year, as well). In the end I will have completed half again as many seminars to earn my degree, in the same amount of time, balancing teaching all the while. I also am held to a higher GPA standard. I am allowed up to one grade of B- in a course, which must be repeated. Two final grades of B- or less and I'm out of the program. I'm okay with the high standard. It has never given me grief before this semester. High expectations make me work harder. Consider, though, for contrast, the requirements for linguistics MA students: Two graduate courses per semester. No teaching appointment. Any grade of C or better counts happily toward the degree. What this means is that my phonetics professor thinks its perfectly acceptable to give me a C. I'm not anticipating a C, mind you, and I'm not shoving off my personal accountability for my final grade. In the end it's up to me. However, given that the last few homework assignments have called for physics that I never learned and statistics that I've long forgotten, neither of which was explained in class or readings or lecture notes, I worry. I'm a decent autodidact with many things, but not with math or hard science. I can't read a formula on a page and just get it. I can get help with homework assignments from the left-brainers in my life, but I'm concerned that much of this material will make an appearance on the final exam when my right-brain and I are left to our own meager devices. I'm more than a little scared that I won't pull off something better than a B and that I'll have to repeat this dismal scenario next fall. The phonetics prof is a nice person, but certainly not nice enough that I want to repeat her class. I don't like anyone that much.

I have never in my life been so terrified of a B minus.

I should quit griping. I can find a way to pass this class. I might be able to sleep less and push myself a little harder. In the end I have to settle for the personal satisfaction of knowing I worked harder for my degree, that I had to work harder to get into my program in the first place, blah, blah, blah. At some point it's not worth it to worry about whether or not things are fair, because inevitably they aren't, usually from many angles. Will that make it any easier to get a job?

Lola has to write a project proposal, and promises that tomorrow's entry will be less negative. Sometimes I just need to get it off my chest.