Finally!

Last Saturday was graduation at the high school where I teach and I really didn't want to get out of bed that morning to go (it started at 8:30 on a Saturday morning, really school? Our students don't even get to school until 10 at the earliest!) but then I thought about a bunch of my students who were graduating and some of them are the first in their family to get a high school diploma.  Some of them have been at this school since it started in 2009-10 (a.k.a. as long as I have been there, (four years if you're lazy like me and don't want to do the math) which sounds great since high school is normally four years, but my school is an accelerated program for overage students who have dropped out or got kicked out of other schools, and you can go from zero credits to the required 21 credits in less than two years if you just pass all your classes.  So having some of those kids from my first year graduate is a pretty big deal, since some of them have literally been in high school for 6 or 7 years.  So short story long (sorry about that), I went and it was nice and I got a kajillion hugs, and a bunch of thank yous and it reminded me why I go to work everyday.  For them.

Then I got home and karma paid off.

Yes, my Johns Hopkins Diploma was waiting for me.  Which is super exciting, because like some of my students who took 7 years to get their high school diploma, I took 4 years to get my masters degree, in what originally was supposed to be a 2 year program.  I finished all my Hopkins classes back in Spring of 2011 (right on schedule), but I was feeling a little overwhelmed at the time and decided not to do my portfolio presentation or some of the other random requirements until the summer and get my diploma in August, just a couple of months later than originally planned.  No big deal.  The other random requirements were some undergraduate economics and political science classes because I got my Masters in Secondary Social Studies, but my undergraduate degree was just History, so my transcript didn't have enough classes in some of those other social studies areas. So in May 2011 I signed up for some BYU online classes and worked on them for a couple weeks and then I put off everything because, hey, it was summer break and I could always finish in the fall! Besides, my classes had a whole year before they needed to be finished.  So I worked really hard and finished my portfolio in November and then my sorta-adviser (because my original academic adviser retired in May, and I wasn't assigned a new one, so things got all sorts of messed up there.) got confused and told me when it was due, and actually that was the day of presentations so no dice, it got put off until May, a bit frustrating, but no big deal because I hadn't finished my classes yet!  So I waited and waited to hear back about that and they didn't have presentations in the spring because they changed the program and blah blah blah and finally I finished the portfolio in May, but once again I put off my online classes and had to buy an extension and I had dropped the econ one because it was ridiculous that I had to tear pages out of a $150 textbook and physically mail (yeah, in an online class) them to the professor who also happened to be the author of said textbook so now I needed to sign up for another economics class somewhere and...yeah, so August 2012 it is!  I got my online classes finished that summer, but all the econ classes I tried to sign up for at a local community college were full, so that didn't happen, so Fall 2012 it is!  Then in August I got an email that my Praxis scores were no longer valid to go towards my degree (even though I'm already a certified teacher!) since they changed the test to incorporate the the common core or some nonsense so I decided nevermind! I don't need a masters!  But my parents and Kelly weren't having it, so I tried to sign up for the Econ class and they were all full, so I took it in Spring 2013. I finally got around to retaking the Praxis in April (easy, but waste of a Saturday.  Boo!) and sent the score report in on May 14 and never heard anything back, so I wasn't sure if I was going to graduate. Especially because I decided not to walk because I'm so done with this.  In fact, this morning I pondered aloud to Kelly "I wonder if I graduated or not?" (JHU's graduation was on May 23, by the way.) And then today I got home and there was my diploma!  I guess it's finally official; I have my masters.  You may all call me "master" now, and I will call everyone "padowan."

My sister in law wrote a good post about online safety, so I remembered to censor out my maiden & last names.  I can't remember if they are on this blog somewhere or not, but at least they're not in this pic! Or the other one up there!

Now we just have to get Kelly through school.  He's talking about getting a masters in Latin American History.  That's way cooler than my degree.  Now I want another one!  Except I don't want to do any of the work.  Do you think JHU does trade ins?