And thus it re-begins….
As Winter Break closes and Spring Semester begins, my peripheral life sucks into tunnel vision and I can only see MSW. I will breath, sleep, eat, and live only social work for the next 15 weeks.
It all re-began last Thursday when my profs started creating their online Moodle courses for Spring Semester. Moodle is an interactive online learning system that is relatively new to the University of Montana, and I have received training to help train faculty on how to use it. I have been dubbed Moodle Melanie by profs and fellow classmates, and am called in anytime someone has a Moodle question. I thoroughly enjoy this title, and picture myself with a bright red cape billowing in the wind as I stand stoically, hands on my hips, head and chest thrust forward in confidence believing that I can handle any Moodle question thrown my way.
“Believing” is the key word, there are TONS of Moodle questions I don’t know the answer to. What makes me look like a super hero to my profs though is that I have the true Moodle Queen, Nancy, on speed dial and can get the answer to any question at a moment’s notice.
But I digress….
Last Thursday and Friday, I took a 2-day wintersession course that met from 9am to 4pm both days. During which I also received random phone calls about Moodle. I spent lunch hours and breaks both days returning calls and texts to profs. By day, I was Motivational Interviewing student, and then by night I was Moodle Melanie researching the answers to said prof’s questions.
Over the weekend, I was simply Melanie, laying around watching TV, knitting, sewing, walking dogs, and being a girlfriend. Oh, and breaking two sewing machines, but that’s another story.
Moodle Melanie flew onto campus Monday morning, pretending to be confident in her abilities to help a prof with a new format our favorite local super hero had not worked with before. (It’s fun to talk about one’s self in the third person, but after awhile it gets annoying so I’ll switch over to 1st person now….) I worked back-to-back with 2 profs, one of which surprised me with a hug at the end of our 2.5 hour meeting. Mr. Narcissism, (and I use that term endearingly, and he also calls himself that should anyone think I'm being rude), really had almost everything figured out by himself, and my help was minimal during our extended meeting. But he must have thought differently because he gave me a hug at the end of our meeting, and set a time for another meeting later in the week.
Moodle Melanie then morphed into Grief Counselor Melanie working at Tamarack Grief Resource Center all day Tuesday. She will morph yet again back into Moodle Melanie Wednesday, Grief Counselor Melanie on Thursday, and MSW Student Melanie Thursday night and all day Friday.
To give you an idea of what my life looks like, here’s a schedule of what my weeks will entail for the rest of the semester:
Monday – Grief Counselor Melanie will co-facilitate divorce group in the morning morph into Moodle Melanie for meetings with profs the remaining part of the day, change into Regular Melanie for Monday night
Tuesday – Grief Counselor Melanie from 10-5, MSW Student Melanie 6-7:30, Regular Melanie the rest of the evening
Wednesday – Moodle Melanie in the morning, MSW Student Melanie and Regular Melanie alternating in the afternoon, Knitting Melanie at night from 7-10
Thursday – MSW Student Melanie in the morning, Grief Counselor Melanie in the afternoon, and MSW Student Melanie again in the evening
Friday – MSW Student Melanie 8-5, Regular Melanie (which typically means passed-out-on-the-couch-from-physical-and-emotional-exhaustion in the evening)
Saturday and Sunday – MSW Student Melanie and Regular Melanie alternating throughout both days
And then it all starts over again on Monday morning……
Just writing this down makes me dizzy.
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