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philenaBut for all of you waiting with baited breath to hear about Monterey, here it is in a nutshell: I'm not going. The students I met didn't excite me; the campus didn't excite me; even the program, when I started looking at it more carefully, didn't really excite me. And the classes most of all didn't excite me. The students did not have any of the passion for their studies or quickness of intellect that I take for granted here in my classmates, the campus, while clean and modern, had nothing to recommend it: the library had 100,000 volumes, for example. The Regenstein has 7 million volumes, and is planning to increase that by another 3.5 million in the next few years. I know it's not fair to compare a little institute with the University of Chicago--proportionally, they're probably very comparable. It's just that this severe smallness (it's smaller than the public library in Fort Wayne) really drove in that I will not be studying at a Big School if I go there, which means that if there's anything I don't like, it will be nearer and less likable than any small annoyances which are muffled by school here. And those annoyances will probably be many: the TESOL program, I heard from other students, seemed to be taking a back seat to the other programs at the school, receiving less attention and being forced to deal with decisions that were more a factor of what benefited the international studies programs than what benefited the school as a whole. This could have been no problem if the classes I had visited had been exciting, but they weren't. The best was a Second Language Acquisition class, that covered a great deal of interesting research and theory, but the students were unanimous in telling me that it was not a typical class, and the fact that they did not seem as interested in it as I was was another warning signal. And then the class that was typical (Principles and Practices of Language Teaching) seemed to be nothing more than a high school class with a heavier work load and a higher level of moral (which probably comes naturally if you're paying $38,000 a year to take the class). I felt homesick for the academic rigor I've grown accustomed to here, so much so that I felt lonely even for my semantics class! I felt so much longing for my UofC linguistics that now I'm even thinking seriously of gowing to graduate school in linguistics or Slavic languages, something I had sworn before I didn't want to do. I even have an idea of how I can expand my BA project into a full master's thesis. But as far as Monterey goes, I'm not going. Which means now the job hunt starts in earnest. Today will be cover-letter day.*
When we went down to Monterey together, I got sick. I felt slightly ill--sore throat, headache--as soon as we left Berkeley, and by the time we reached our hotel I had little energy to do anything but collapse in bed and whimper. So Daniel went out, got me tylenol, tea, milk for the tea, vaseline for my chapped lips, and essentially ministered to my shivering wreck of a body. The next day, when I was feeling slightly better (a condition which lasted about as long as it took for me to get to the Monterey Institute for my appointments and then get rained on all day), he went to visit an area high school, because if I decided to go to the Monterey Institute he would need to get a job in that area. (Let us take a moment to appreciate the fact that he was ready simply to pack up and move to wherever I was going to go, leaving behind what was essentially a standing offer to teach at a high school that he liked and wanted to work at.) When we met up that evening, he wouldn't talk about his day until he knew how mine had gone, and then he took me to the Monterey Aquarium, where we wandered at my whim only. When I got cold, he gave me his warmer sweater. When I wanted tea, we stopped at the cafe and got tea. When I felt ill again and wanted to go, we went. And because I was sick and didn't want to go out that evening he satisfied his hunger with leftover Chinese food from dinner the night before, leaving more than half of it for me**. The next day, when I went to the classes at the institute and realized that I didn't want to go, I started crying when I met up to tell him, and he hugged me and talked to me and didn't even mention that he had liked the school he had visited and would be happy to teach there. He probably wouldn't have talked about it at all if I hadn't asked him.
And then there's simply the fact that this boy wants to be a high school math teacher, and determines whether he wants to teach at a school based not on how well the school will treat him, but on how many students he can help. He's not unrealistically idealistic***, but he has a strong sense of what is right, and he's so smart and capable that people he has worked with have almost unanimously agreed that he will be a fabulous teacher. One even said that it will be scary to see how good he will be. I could tell them that without ever having worked with them, but for some reason people won't believe that my opinion is unbiased. At times I feel almost jealous, because his future seems so set and secure, while mine is just a floating ether of what-can-I-do-with-no-specialized-training-or-real-prospects? But then I remember that he's mine, all mine, so there's no reason to be jealous.
**For somebody who likes food as much as he does, this was a big sacrifice.
***A judgment that probably means little, coming from somebody who's doing most of her job search from a website called idealist.org
Oh, by the way (can't hurt to ask): anyone in the bay area, do you want to give me a job?
And let's now talk about fun stuff. The Monterey area is great for marine wildlife! The bay is beautiful, clean, blue, and there are cormorants and otters just floating out there. When Daniel and I were drinking tea in the cafe at the aquarium we had a nice view of the bay where cormorants were sunning themselves on a rock an otter floated in the bay, diving and resurfacing and floating on his back. And in the aquarium there were absolutely no large mammals, like beluga whales or sea lions or seals, which it hurt to see cooped up in the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago. The otters were the largest mammals I saw, and although they didn't have much room square footage, there was quite a bit of cubic footage of water. They could and did dive very deep and swim very fast, occasionally stopping to splash and groom, and they seemed to be content. Certainly they were adorable, especially when they floated on their backs or groomed their fur. And even though it was nice to see them in the wild, I was glad of a chance to see more than a little dark smudge a hundred feet out from the shoreline that you had to know was an otter before it became recognizable.
Our last day in Monterey we drove down to Big Sur, and stopped at Point Lobos, so named because the sea lions that gather there bark like wolves. I thought that they only sounded like wolves if the wolves had been breathing helium (ork! ork ork ork ork ork! ork ork! ork orkorkorkorkork!), but certainly it made sense to name the point after them. We heard them clearly well before we could see them, and when we could see them they maintained my previous comparison: the only way they were wolfish would be if the wolves had been snorting something. (ork ork ork ork ork!) And between the rock where they were basking there were more otters swimming in the water, playing in a surf that looked hideously dangerous for any non-marine animal. It was nice to see how well they could carry themselves, but it made me feel more unhappy for the otters I had seen at the aquarium. No matter how content those ones had seemed, there was no way they could have as good a time in their calm little tank that these otters were having in the wild.
On the way back to Berkeley we stopped at Ano Nuevo, where we saw elephant seal pups (most of the adults had already left) basking in the sun, completing their last growth before they would be ready to head off back into the water. The tour guide said that they were just 300 pounds of fat cute, which I thought was an odd description, but when I saw them I realized instantly that she was right. Seals are different from sea lions in that they can't turn their back flippers around and use them for motion. They can only hump along in the sand using their front flippers, as we saw some pups doing, and they look pretty awkward. They'll move along at a good clip for twenty feet or so, blubber rippling with the motion, and then go splat on the sand to rest. Occasionally they'll swat at each other and make squawking noises, but mostly they just lie on the sand, bellies up, occasionally flipping more sand onto their bellies with their flippers to protect themselves from the sun. Once or twice they'll snort, but mostly they just lie there--300 pound of fat cute. Their faces are especially cute, peeping out of a big round mass of tummy that shines in the sun. They reminded me much more of wolves than the sea lions did, but only if the wolves are sleeping puppies, which is, among wolves, a condition debateably more likely to be found than that of having been inhaling helium.
So to conclude: Monterey: no. Daniel: the greatest. Marine mammals: cute. Job: in the works.
***I gotta say, considering how important the cover letter is when one applies for a job, the samples they have on the CAPS website are pretty boring and uninspiring. I don't know whether that means that the ones I've written are too eloquent (I do let my earnestness show through, in the hopes that it will cover for any lack of previous experience that will be all too obvious), or just that CAPS is full of boring sample cover-letters. This probably won't affect my writing style, though. If I de-eloquence my cover letters, all I have are blank spaces where the CAPS examples say I should insert my previous experience.
When we went down to Monterey together, I got sick. I felt slightly ill--sore throat, headache--as soon as we left Berkeley, and by the time we reached our hotel I had little energy to do anything but collapse in bed and whimper. So Daniel went out, got me tylenol, tea, milk for the tea, vaseline for my chapped lips, and essentially ministered to my shivering wreck of a body. The next day, when I was feeling slightly better (a condition which lasted about as long as it took for me to get to the Monterey Institute for my appointments and then get rained on all day), he went to visit an area high school, because if I decided to go to the Monterey Institute he would need to get a job in that area. (Let us take a moment to appreciate the fact that he was ready simply to pack up and move to wherever I was going to go, leaving behind what was essentially a standing offer to teach at a high school that he liked and wanted to work at.) When we met up that evening, he wouldn't talk about his day until he knew how mine had gone, and then he took me to the Monterey Aquarium, where we wandered at my whim only. When I got cold, he gave me his warmer sweater. When I wanted tea, we stopped at the cafe and got tea. When I felt ill again and wanted to go, we went. And because I was sick and didn't want to go out that evening he satisfied his hunger with leftover Chinese food from dinner the night before, leaving more than half of it for me**. The next day, when I went to the classes at the institute and realized that I didn't want to go, I started crying when I met up to tell him, and he hugged me and talked to me and didn't even mention that he had liked the school he had visited and would be happy to teach there. He probably wouldn't have talked about it at all if I hadn't asked him.
And then there's simply the fact that this boy wants to be a high school math teacher, and determines whether he wants to teach at a school based not on how well the school will treat him, but on how many students he can help. He's not unrealistically idealistic***, but he has a strong sense of what is right, and he's so smart and capable that people he has worked with have almost unanimously agreed that he will be a fabulous teacher. One even said that it will be scary to see how good he will be. I could tell them that without ever having worked with them, but for some reason people won't believe that my opinion is unbiased. At times I feel almost jealous, because his future seems so set and secure, while mine is just a floating ether of what-can-I-do-with-no-specialized-training-or-real-prospects? But then I remember that he's mine, all mine, so there's no reason to be jealous.
**For somebody who likes food as much as he does, this was a big sacrifice.
***A judgment that probably means little, coming from somebody who's doing most of her job search from a website called idealist.org
Oh, by the way (can't hurt to ask): anyone in the bay area, do you want to give me a job?
And let's now talk about fun stuff. The Monterey area is great for marine wildlife! The bay is beautiful, clean, blue, and there are cormorants and otters just floating out there. When Daniel and I were drinking tea in the cafe at the aquarium we had a nice view of the bay where cormorants were sunning themselves on a rock an otter floated in the bay, diving and resurfacing and floating on his back. And in the aquarium there were absolutely no large mammals, like beluga whales or sea lions or seals, which it hurt to see cooped up in the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago. The otters were the largest mammals I saw, and although they didn't have much room square footage, there was quite a bit of cubic footage of water. They could and did dive very deep and swim very fast, occasionally stopping to splash and groom, and they seemed to be content. Certainly they were adorable, especially when they floated on their backs or groomed their fur. And even though it was nice to see them in the wild, I was glad of a chance to see more than a little dark smudge a hundred feet out from the shoreline that you had to know was an otter before it became recognizable.
Our last day in Monterey we drove down to Big Sur, and stopped at Point Lobos, so named because the sea lions that gather there bark like wolves. I thought that they only sounded like wolves if the wolves had been breathing helium (ork! ork ork ork ork ork! ork ork! ork orkorkorkorkork!), but certainly it made sense to name the point after them. We heard them clearly well before we could see them, and when we could see them they maintained my previous comparison: the only way they were wolfish would be if the wolves had been snorting something. (ork ork ork ork ork!) And between the rock where they were basking there were more otters swimming in the water, playing in a surf that looked hideously dangerous for any non-marine animal. It was nice to see how well they could carry themselves, but it made me feel more unhappy for the otters I had seen at the aquarium. No matter how content those ones had seemed, there was no way they could have as good a time in their calm little tank that these otters were having in the wild.
On the way back to Berkeley we stopped at Ano Nuevo, where we saw elephant seal pups (most of the adults had already left) basking in the sun, completing their last growth before they would be ready to head off back into the water. The tour guide said that they were just 300 pounds of fat cute, which I thought was an odd description, but when I saw them I realized instantly that she was right. Seals are different from sea lions in that they can't turn their back flippers around and use them for motion. They can only hump along in the sand using their front flippers, as we saw some pups doing, and they look pretty awkward. They'll move along at a good clip for twenty feet or so, blubber rippling with the motion, and then go splat on the sand to rest. Occasionally they'll swat at each other and make squawking noises, but mostly they just lie on the sand, bellies up, occasionally flipping more sand onto their bellies with their flippers to protect themselves from the sun. Once or twice they'll snort, but mostly they just lie there--300 pound of fat cute. Their faces are especially cute, peeping out of a big round mass of tummy that shines in the sun. They reminded me much more of wolves than the sea lions did, but only if the wolves are sleeping puppies, which is, among wolves, a condition debateably more likely to be found than that of having been inhaling helium.
So to conclude: Monterey: no. Daniel: the greatest. Marine mammals: cute. Job: in the works.
***I gotta say, considering how important the cover letter is when one applies for a job, the samples they have on the CAPS website are pretty boring and uninspiring. I don't know whether that means that the ones I've written are too eloquent (I do let my earnestness show through, in the hopes that it will cover for any lack of previous experience that will be all too obvious), or just that CAPS is full of boring sample cover-letters. This probably won't affect my writing style, though. If I de-eloquence my cover letters, all I have are blank spaces where the CAPS examples say I should insert my previous experience.
