Criminal Behavior and Teaching Math

So, I had to come into the office early this morning to get fingerprinted, which concerns me since that means I'll be thrown out of here as soon as they match those fingerprints to the ones on the mini fridge in the dean's office and realize that I'm the midnight cheese bandit. However, since I guess I'll be here a little while longer, I decided to try to act as natural as possible while they ran each of my fingers over a little piece of glass and pretend that I hadn't had this done before that one time in Paris at the dog show but we don't mention that anymore so just pretend I didn't say that.

Now that I've met my obligation to the state, I guess I can go lurk around in public school classrooms and if anyone bothers me I'll tell them my fingerprints are on file, so if they have a problem they can go look me up. Meanwhile I'll be in class for the next 5,248 hours or so, since I now have not only the three required courses plus the additional IES fellowship course where we get free pizza, but still there are readings and assignments, so it's not like it's Pizza Class, which is what I was hoping, but I also have a fifth class that I have to "audit" that's about teaching kids math because apparently they think that if you've never taught kids math or learned how to teach kids math, maybe you shouldn't be on the project where you're evaluating how people teach kids math. Math. I've never audited a class before, mainly because I like grades, especially A's and auditing sounds like all the work of putting on pants and sitting in public without any reward of a big blue ribbon with a gold medal on it. This is why I left the work world and went back to school, isn't it? So I can do a lot of the same things, but get more positive feedback and warm fuzzies. Turns out that's not what a PhD is about, which is a big bummer, so I guess I'll have to, as my mom would say "Go make myself a medal,"* so if you need me I'll be in the Home Ec building looking for blue silk.

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* It should be noted that this was not a mean thing my mom would say to me, but rather a mean thing she once said to her little sister, so it's not a story about my childhood trauma, but rather about how even moms don't like their little sisters sometimes.

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