On the upside

My head is still attached to my shoulders, though for parts of the day it did feel like it was floating somewhere in the stratosphere.
Things seems to be on the way to resolution with the bank. Now it's just a waiting game. Amazing how quickly they can deduct money out of your account but they take their sweet ass time to put it back in. I know how the banking system works, they make money off of your money. But it's MINE! Sorry, that's the only child coming out in me.
Belle does seem to be doing better now that she is getting to go out with her adoptive mom more. She's my little girl, she can pull through anything. Sending good vibes and love all the time to her.
But on the upper upside, I have knocked out a few homework assignments tonight. Hopefully, they won't need any revisions.
Explain to me this, though: if I'm in a performance mastery program (I don't progress in my program until I am able to demonstrate mastery or competency of certain criteria), isn't it somewhat ironic that some of my tasks ask me to perform tasks that would never actually be done in the classroom? What does this prove that I can master?
For example, I had to create a unit with two lesson plans. Each of these lesson plans had to have two goals. Each goal had to have three objectives. Okay, I may not yet be a full time teacher, but I have spent enough time in the classroom to know that this is totally unrealistic. This unit would take over a month to implement. The kids would be overwhelmed with information and I would feel pressed for time to get it all in.
So why set up novice teachers to think that this is how it's done? I get the point--make sure we know how to write goals and objectives in a lesson plan. But a competent teacher would not do this! So no competency or mastery truly demonstrated.
This assignment took me almost a week to do b/c along with the goals and objectives, I also had to create the activities for the lessons and give samples of desired work and list resources, yada yada.
In comparison, I just knocked out two assignments tonight. Each took about half an hour to do.
Ugh, instead of inundating me with one assignment and then making the others just busy work, consolidate and balance!
But I'm almost half way through this class! I need to go create a bulletin board now and take a picture of it to submit. Really, for high school?! Okay, whatever. Too bad I'm not in elementary ed (I'm doing secondary) b/c I just put together a kickass "bulletin board" for the toddler. It has a reusable calendar so that he can learn the days of the week, the months, and such ("calendar math"). I put Velcro tabs on the numbers and months so that he can learn to tack them up. And he now has a weather frog he can dress according to the weather. As well as complete the sentence "today's weather is..." with clouds, sun, snow, and their corresponding picture.
One downer--darling hubby pointed out that the weather frog was pointless b/c how many outfits would the frog really wear in SoCal. Whatev--we wear sweaters here with our flip-flops.