I think the title (and image) pretty much sums up how I'm feeling these days, I have MANY moments when I feel like there aren't enough hours in a day for me to get all the things I need to get done! But there isn't much I'd change about it because I'm learning so much and growing in so many ways!!
One of the things I'm most proud of is how much I've improved as a professor over the last few months, and I can admit that it did take a LOT for me to get adjusted to the "Demographics" of students I teach. I say it to my supervisor all the time, this particular experience has been more a lesson in adjusting my teaching in ways that would prove most helpful to my students who are not only minority, but come from the lowest of economic backgrounds. I understand much better how an attitude of mediocrity gets passed on from generation to the next and is often mistaken from people from higher SES (socio economic status) as laziness or being unmotivated to learn. But it's almost impossible to maintain motivation to study when you're taking care of family, working, AND going to school. Being a minority myself, I can empathize with what they deal with in life, but trust me I have NO problem being tough when I need to be. So it makes my day when my students tell me they look up to me and I even have one who told me she wants to be a Chemistry professor just like me! :)
Moving on, I mentioned that I frequently walk in my downtown neighborhood and even though I'm from the south, I'd never in my life seen the following on trees growing up:
If my daughter hadn't spotted this, I'd never EVER notice it myself, so I guess nature/evolution has a way of making sure delicate/vulnerable species survive (there's an MCAT topic here, ROTFL!!) The tree I saw must have had 500 caterpillars all clustered together in "packs" of 3 or more per tree! And on this note, I'm going to end this post because this picture makes my skin crawl REAL bad, LOL!!!!!
