Refreshing

I'm looking through the stuff for my TGC online course, and boy is it going to be work.  It's been a very long time since I had school work that I actually could look forward to, not since I was taking those graduate 8000 level English courses for fun.  I hope I can manage to put together intelligent responses and not make too much of an idiot of myself among all the learned folk.

The topics here are very cool, engaging to me, and if the other people doing this are also interested, then the discussions we have (which are how we are getting our grades) should be very good indeed.  I think this might be a massive shot in the arm for me.  Right now, I am in a major...rut is far too kind a word for it.  What's lower than that?  Pit?  Valley?  Abyss?  I don't know.  Go with one of those.  I think exchanging new ideas with new minds is going to be fresh water into a pool that is fast going dry.

I've been leaning against my sturdy red brick wall lately and thinking more and more about running away.  There has been less and less holding me there; I've been feeling the bonds that hold me slipping a little more each day.  This experience is going to do one of two things, really.  It's either going to remind me why I do what I do where I do it, revitalize me and refocus me, give me what I need to rekindle the flame that is sputtering right now, or....

It's going to be the thing that finally cuts the last of the bonds altogether and reminds me that there are other things out there in the wider world.

I can't tell you which it will be.  I can't tell you which one is right one.  I just know every time I think about the online stuff, the meeting of people who think it's awesome that there are other people in the world, other cultures, other ways of doing things, other places our students might go and be involved in, I feel a little better about life.