The course catalog arrived!
It is my favorite time of the year (not!) The Spring 2008 course catalog arrived, and so I spent a couple of hours going through it trying to figure out what classes I want to take in the upcoming semester. Yes, I said a couple of hours. I don’t know if it is normal for people to take that long, but I put a lot of thought into this trying to make sure I’m making just the right choices. The first step was to go through and circle all the online and hybrid courses that are available and are still a unfulfilled requirement in obtaining my degree. Why? Because I really love and prefer online courses. It is hard to find a “standard” course that meets my needs as far as hours go. Most are Monday through Friday during standard business hours. As a stay at home mom, I am the caregiver for the children during the time my husband works. Take a wild guess when that is? Yep, standard business hours. Online courses take that problem away. I can log in to the course while my kids are napping, or when they are playing quietly, or even at midnight if I want. The choices for online courses for the Spring semester? Health and Sociology.
Ok, not the most thrilling classes in the world, but what I’m worried about is a more pressing problem. See, over the last year I’ve noticed that the same standard courses are being offered online. If I take both these classes this semester I most likely won’t be able to take an online class for the Summer semester. I need to take an online class over the Summer because I travel right in the middle of the semester, namely the family reunion in West Virginia. As long as I take my class online, I can go anywhere and still get the work done and turned in so long as I have internet access (which I know from experience that both hotels we typically stay at while at the reunion do). Ideally my goal is to take 5 classes a year. Two in the Spring, 1 in the Summer, and 2 in the Fall. This means that my best bet is to take one online class for the Spring semester (saving one for the Summer), and maybe take a hybrid, weekend, or night course.
So I go back and look at the hybrid list. I find 4 classes I can take. All of these classes are science related and include a weekly online lecture and a weekly on campus lab. Fine, I check the lab times. 2 of the classes are the standard M-F business hours. They get crossed off. That leaves the other two. The “night” labs for both classes start at 5pm on Thursdays. Another problem. Two actually. One, on a good traffic day Joe can comes home at 5pm. There are days he is later. There is just no guarantee. No matter what I would need to leave at the very latest at 4:40pm just to barely make the lab on time. The other problem is that Alex has gymnastics from 5:30pm to 6:30pm. Needless to say, those classes get crossed off. I’m just not having much luck picking my classes right about now.
I go through the standard courses and find about 6 or 7 classes that are considered night and one that is considered weekend. The 5pm night courses get crossed off, and then I cross off the later starting night courses (6:30pm, 6:45pm, 7:00pm) because as (not so much) luck would have it they either fell on a Thursday, Monday, or both. As I said before, Thursday is a problem because of Alex’s gymnastics. Monday is a problem because Joe has his ham radio club nets and the once a month meeting on Mondays. Then I look at the weekend course. It isn’t a standard 15 week course, but rather it is a 7 week course that falls on the second half of the semester. The hours are good, and outside of Joe having to give up 7 Saturday mornings taking care of the kids (which lets face it, I have “given up” so much time for him and his hobbies, I think he owes me) there really isn’t any problems. I think “this could be nice if I pair it up with another 7 week course for the first half of the semester. I’ll be able to concentrate on one class at a time.” I know from experience that a 7 week course is about 2 weeks worth of work power packed into one week, so I don’t want to over do myself. I go back to the online health and online sociology courses and I find that I can take health for the first 7 weeks of the Spring semester!
Class problem solved! I will be taken health for the first half of the Spring semester and creative arts for the last half of the semester. Joe only has to give up 7 Saturday mornings (which, again, he owes me 
) Life couldn’t be better! Oh wait, it can. Apparently I get a 2 week break between the classes (Spring break, I think?) and I finish up a week earlier than the standard 15 week classes! I’m so doing the happy dance.
Now I just need to wake up nice and early on the 6th to register and thus guarantee my courses before they fill up or anything.
(My husband thinks I’m crazy because I took the most mundane of tasks and turned it into a long drawn out story. Don’t worry, this is nablopomo! I’ve got 27 more days to bore you! 
)
More posts like this:
- Is my spa day here yet? – May 18, 2008
- The YMCA has the best customer service ever. – January 4, 2009
- Snow seriously messes up my day. – January 27, 2009
- Two more weeks. – May 5, 2008
- Math class homework. – February 5, 2009
Kasama
November 4th, 2007 @ 9:41 pm
Hi Modern Princess, besides pretending we live in a blog, we have other things in common. When I was in school, I too spent psychotically inordinate amounts of time thinking about which courses I would take. I ended up “shopping” a lot of courses which took up a lot of my time during the first few weeks of every semester. I thought course selection was a very enjoyable part of the semester. I liked meeting the challenge of finding the most interesting courses to create an optimized schedule. I did this as a full time undergrad and as a part-time grad student. Everyone who knew about me going to bed curling up with the giant course catalog always thought I was a weirdo.