First Day of School

Not only am I a teacher, but starting today, I'm also a student! Yep, I FINALLY got around to starting my master's degree. I wanted to try and start last December at Georgia State, but things just didn't work out for me. So this summer, I decided that I was going to find a school and a program that would work with my schedule. I did LOTS of searching online and found lots of diploma mills, but finally I stumbled on a great university. It's called Western Governor's University, and it's located in Utah. Like its name implies, it was the brainchild of the governors of the nineteen western states. It's a completely online campus. Plus, instead of credit hours, its classes are based on competency units. Once you show competency and pass the assessment for the class, you are finished! It's really designed for working adults who have lots of experience, but need a college degree for career advancement. It's also really easy to apply to, and it's the only completely online school that participate in federal financial aid. It took me about two weeks to go from application to acceptance to start date. Instead of paying for credit hours, you pay a flat per term fee no matter how many classes you take and pass, so it's very affordable. I'm hoping to be able to get my whole degree done for less than $10,000. (Which is ALOT cheaper than some schools I looked at.) I decided to get my master's in special education. My ultimate goal is to teach in a primary self-contained special education classroom. Hopefully, I'll be able to get done in 18 months. We'll have to wait and see. I started my first class today. It's an orientation course that needs to be done in the first two weeks. It's not too difficult, so hopefully I can get it done sooner and get into the meat of my classes. While it will take a lot of organization and planning (and mountains of help from Jeremy), I'm so excited that I've finally taken this step!