Back to the grind

After a great 21 days away, I'm back and resettled into school and work. As much as I like having a routine, some of my feeling about being here have come right back again. It only took one day of classes to be rolling my eyes at what we are doing and be very thankful I brought back my youth ministry books.

The line up this semester is:
Research- aka: what youth worker blog, twitter, resource or online community can I find the information I need in

Assessment and Evaluation- aka: assessing what is going on (um, surveys when you first start a position anyone?), and evaluation is making changes based on the information you assessed.

The professor asked us what our experience has been with this, let's see, I walked into my job and had to assess the status of the ministry, the students spiritual maturity and the church culture, listen to God and go forward with changes via instituting a programming model & budget request. That was in the first month.

One of the new things I can learn is the formal surveys that all colleges use- I already know about one and was working with it at NCSA- Oh! And I was doing so without any classroom time...lookie at that~

Student Development- Learning about some more theorists, reading the book again that I bought and read last year, writing some more papers similar to the ones I wrote in undergrad child psych. We are going to spend a lot of time on a model of how to make changes, yea, I think I've made a lot of changes to ministries, policies and procedures in my time, not plagiarizing myself will be the biggest challenge.

So I'll say it again, grad school is a way God got me here and I need to do the work to remain here but it's not why I'm here. Maybe more so it's to be Christ's light in the program. Yesterday I had a long conversation about another students break and some family challenges she encountered. I'm in some ways shocked because I barely talked with her last term mainly because of scheduling and she was that open with me. That's not the first conversation I've had of great life substance, most likely not the last.