Mid-Semester Madness...

Wow... I'm kind of drawing a blank right now about the latest happenings in my life...

Let's see. Life is still somewhat stressful when it comes to my current academic activities, but everything has become a regular stress, and thus in its regularity slightly less stressful. The irregularity this week was my presentation for German 441R on the history of witchcraft, which went pretty well. The biggest stress is still German 201 - it's my last full week teaching 201, and I'm really going to miss my students. Thursday and Friday I administered oral exams to each one of my twenty eight students, which meant that on Friday I had a three hour marathon of exams without a break. Oral exams were only the beginning. I hadn't gotten my syllabus together for 202, so yesterday I spent over four and a half hours in my office (the longest time span I've ever been there) organizing the readings, grammar chapters and homework with Jared Cook, the other TA in charge of 202. This is the first semester that the 202 classes will actually have a corresponding syllabus, and the readings we decided to incorporate this time should be really helpful to the students. It feels good to have that somewhat more solid... now the next thing I'm going to have to figure out is a speaking activity that I can do for my last day of German 201, so that I can bring it to my pedagogy class on Thursday for someone to critique.

My life certainly isn't all work though. Some of the highlights of my week included eating lunch with Ben and two of his late summer honors friends in the WSC, getting together with Laura to watch devotional (I have to admit we spent the entire time talking/catching up, which we needed desperately, but that was really important), then at the end of the week (Friday) a double date with Ben, my old roommate Allyson and her husband Ben. We went to see the Victorian exhibit in the MOA, then made a fancy, delicious meal (zucchini cheesecake, pork chops, salad, and carrot cake for dessert). It wasn't easy to persuade Ben that sometimes it is important to enjoy more good food than just the essentials (for him the essentials are peanut butter, bread and oatmeal). Saturday morning I visited the BYU lost and found sale, where I found three pair of dance shoes that fit me for under thirty dollars total, then after my marathon in the office Ben and I made stir fry, went for a walk, spent abt. 20 min. in the basement of the HFAC singing/playing the piano, then did some hw.

To sum it all up, life is beautiful... I know the Lord gets me through every day of it.


Love and miss you all!

Margaret