Befuddled

Right now I'm taking a class about research in reading instruction. The U of M calls it a "May-mester" class, which is so awful that it pains me to write it.

Anyway, we're cramming a semester's worth of classes and activities into a three week period, and of course it is the busiest time of the year, what with finals and packing up and ceremonies out the wazoo.

Over the course of this class, we have to teach three chapters of the text, create a research design project, make a portfolio, and do a poster presentation to the class. THREE WEEKS. The professor was going over the syllabus, and I could not understand what she was saying ... oh, I understood the words all right; I just couldn't grasp any sort of meaning from them. I tried so hard to concentrate, but I felt like my eyes kept going out of focus.

At first, I thought I was having difficulty because I'd forgotten to take my Strattera, but then I looked around the room and saw that everybody else in the class had the same glazed look that I could feel on my own face, and I began to feel better.

Our assignment was to read four chapters for tonight, and the book is about research, the nature of research, the theories behind research, empirical data accumulated from research, and I was finding it so hard to draw any meaning whatsoever from the text that it took me forever to finish the first chapter.

With little hope of finishing the reading before class started, I had to make sacrifices. As it happened, I sacrificed my fourth period class. Oh, I didn't throw them off a mountain or cut their hearts out of their chests, but I did pop in Space Jam, tell them to leave me alone, and sit in the back of the room with my hands over my ears as I read.

I finished all four of my chapters (though I admit that I skimmed the one about English Language Learners; that's going to burn me some day) just in time to get to class and get confused all over again.