General Discussion

I became a nurse! Yeah, I'm an AD (Associate Degree) nurse, one of those 2-year degree people that the BSN nurses look down their noses at, but you would not believe the number of baby BSNs I've had to teach the basics to.They come out of college with heads full of theory and not a clue about real patient care. I guess the idea is that they can learn that when they're out in the "real world", while we lowly AD nurses start clinicals the first week of school. Of course the thing is that the 2-year program, for a lot of people, ends up taking 4 years, because you have to take all your prerequisites like English, Speech, and the real toughie, Anatomy and Physiology (that one weeds out a lot of people) and get on the waiting list for regular nursing classes. It wouldn't have taken me that long because I had a lot of those from my other college days----I was once a linguistics major!---but I was going to school while married with 3 young kids, so I part-timed it until I got into the nursing classes. I graduated when my daughter, the youngest, finished first grade.

Sometimes I wonder what I would have been doing had I finished my linguistics degree. My main interest was in translation issues, and why you would or wouldn't use a certain word in favor of another. Remember the uproar over W.'s use of the word "infidel"? That kind of thing. I feel that I might have ended up working for the CIA or maybe the State Department or something. Or maybe not. At the time, though, I couldn't see anything for me except teaching, and I knew I didn't want to do that.