Shopping Tips and Guidance by Mandy Claire

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," learning life's lessons the hard way since 1959! Have you spent some of your life in the School of Hard Knocks? Me too! Maybe we were in the same class but just didn't share homework.

This fall I have been given a master's degree class in reading by my school district. Since I took a pay cut, I figured I ought to recoup some of it by enrolling in the class. I had to drive to our sister campus for the classes (up to an hour commute one way during rush). Overall I would say I learned a few helpful classroom tools. But the teacher aggravated me in the extreme.

(Yes, yes, yes! My three most loyal readers will remember that I have it in for teachers! There's the prissy Mr. G at Spare's school, and the memorable Mr. Bigwand, who could talk for two hours without clearing his throat.)

This latest teacher, whose shapely butt I was glad to see leave the classroom at the end of the term, seems to have forgotten the first rule of teaching: namely, show your students what you want them to do. She assigned "masters degree level" papers to a cohort of teachers (including self) who had never taken a graduate class before, without giving clear guidelines or (gods forbid) showing us a sample of what she wanted!

I'm not kvetching on my part. I got good grades on the papers I've gotten back so far. But many of my colleagues were not so lucky. Some of them might have to reimburse the school for the tuition, which I'm thinking might run to $1500. That's a heck of a hunk out of an already-reduced teacher salary.

My feeling is that the professor will grade on a curve. My other feeling is that some people just didn't bother to work as hard as they could have.

But this class brought me to a big-time reckoning.

My days in the apparent world are numbered.

I want to continue learning. But the learning must feed my soul, not my stomach.

There's one more free class I can take in the spring before I would have to enroll in the master's degree program formally. That class sounds like it will be useful for my professional development. I plan to take it. (Different professor. Probably won't like him either.)

After that, it's on to Soul School. Probably modern Druidic studies. As Shakespeare put it, "The time of life is short. To spend that shortness basely were too long."