"Fall is here, ring the bell, back to school..."

Greetings everyone!

Well, Ashley and I are now ready to embark upon another school year.  Ashley had about a four month break from school and I had a two-month break.  With that in mind, we were both ready to get back into school.  For Ashley, that had been the longest she had gone with no school since she started school!  That last week of Summer was quite busy as we prepared for school, especially for me.

I don't know if I have mentioned this before, but I am a part of a pilot program that BYU is attempting.  BYU has created 12 online courses.  These courses are for enrolled students at BYU and will be counted as part of their tuition.  Anyways, I was hired to be the TA for one of these courses.  Since they are all online, the TAs have a lot of responsibility and I spent much of the week before school learning the technological side of things, preparing the set-up, conversing with the professor and etc.

Now that a week has gone by, things have been quite a bit different.  Continuing the thread of the previous paragraph, my TA job has been going well.  We held our orientation meeting, the only in-person meeting of the entire semester, on Tuesday and it went very well.  I have since met with a few students one-on-one as the program requires and the meetings have gone well.  It is still a bit of adjusting, (including having my own cubicle to work in! Well, I share it with one other person, but still...) but it has been quite interesting.  I think it will be a very nice resume builder.

School has been another matter.  As much as Ashley and I were really bored without school, we were not prepared for the sudden decrease of time we got to spend together.  For the first few days, even when I was home with Ashley, I was required to do homework or reading for my classes.  That has made life a little challenging but we will get adjusted as the semester wears on.

Now for classes: I am taking a lot of interesting courses.  I am taking two Humanities seminar classes.  One is studying Hans Christian Andersen which has been very interesting and the other is addressing current issues in the Humanities.  For the latter course, we are focusing on the reactions to 9-11.  This is a very challenging class.  On Friday, we watched some footage from the day.  At the end of the class (there are only three students so it is pretty open) the professor remarked about how this class was going to be tough emotionally in some ways.  I responded that it was important for me since I was a child when 9-11 actually occurred to actually come to terms with this tragic event as an adult.  So I am very interested in that class, no matter how challenging the subject matter is.

I am also taking a US History course from 1945-the present.  So far, I am LOVING the class.  I knew I chose the right emphasis when I decided to read my history textbook for fun before class even started.  Right now, we are discussing the foundations of the Cold War, which has been very interesting.  I am learning a lot.  My other two courses are a computers in the humanities course where I will be learning about internet publishing, aka learning the basics of html, css, and java script.  I have had some background in java script but I am excited to learn other scripting languages.  My last course is Spanish 205 and easily the most demanding course of them all.  I am way out of my element when it comes to learning a language but it will be for the best.

Ashley is also taking a full class load.  She is taking one of the pilot courses that I was mentioning earlier in the post.  Her class is Doctrine and Covenants so it is not too hard, but she is excited to try it out.  She is also taking Abnormal Psychology, Psychology Testing, Writing within psychology, and Theatre and Media arts for a GE.  Her Abnormal Psychology will be having her favorite coursework because of her interest in psychopathology but it also requires 22 hours of volunteering during the semester at the Utah State Hospital working with the mentally ill.  It'll be a challenge to work it into the schedule but the experience should be very rewarding.  In Psychology Testing, it will require a group project which are always demanding.  She had experience last semester with a very inadequate group in her Research methods class.  She is really excited to be into her major classes but is going to be burdened with a lot of work.

On top of school, Ashley and I will still be working at the temple and working about 18-20 hours each week.  Therefore, we shall be quite busy.  We are super excited though to be able to learn at this wonderful school.  Life has been very kind to us.  For all of you, whomever chooses to read this, we wish you the best of luck in work/school/family life/whatever else you may be doing! :-)