success!
2006-04-04 | 9:59 p.m.

My friend and I presented our paper on childhood apraxia of speech tonight. This is a good thing for two reasons. One, we worked our asses off on that paper, and there's a great sense of satisfaction that comes with seeing it finished and looking like a rather good piece of academic writing. Two, it marks the end of our pediatric rehabilitation seminar.

That makes two classes out of six, completely and totally finished!

True, the other is the clinical seminar, which is a pass/fail course with only one assignment, but you have to take what you can get.

Another class is all done but for the exam. I've got one lecture left in each of the remaining three, plus one additional exam and three projects. Okay, so there's still a lot to do. Still, the end is in sight, and I have to say, it's a beautiful sight indeed.

It would be even more beautiful if the temperature hadn't suddenly dropped ... twenty-one degrees on Friday, and now we're sitting at minus one. There's snow on the ground outside.

I therefore declare today to be the day of the obligatory April snowfall, and claim the right to be outraged should any more fluffy white stuff fall from the sky before, say, November.

But the really exciting thing is this: I got the lab job!

I have a job for the summer! A job that will pay me actual money! A job here in Montreal! A job that's actually in my field! A job that will give me some real, live lab experience!

Okay, so most of that is going to be data-entry and cropping acoustic waveforms. And I really really needed to spend more time at Beatty Hall. Really.

But I'm excited anyway!

I had my last day of placement today, too. For the past month, we've been working on pre-reading / phonological awareness skills with a kindergarten class. Today we retested the kids who did poorly on the screening, and guess what?? They were better at syllable-counting, initial-sound matching, letter identification and rhyming than they were before!

So it looks like we made a difference.

Yes, life is good.

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