Skip to main content

Back to School: Round 2, Week 9

One more week to go! Or so I thought...

There is an extra week that I've opted to take. The school is running a Solar Photovoltaic Installation course that is funded by the Ministry of Training as an update clinic for any apprentices and journeymen. I figured that I'm in school mode anyways, and if I don't have to pay for it, it would be good to add to my skill set. 

Apart from that, the learning is done! Now just review and study, study, study. Next week we have at least one, and sometimes two tests per day. A couple of classes include both a written and a practical portion of testing. Just about every evening next week is going to be dedicated to review stuff for the test the day before. I'm not going to get too carried away with as. I figure if I don't know it by now, cramming isn't going to add much more. 

I was putting away laundry this weekend, when I realized I'll have to go back to wearing work shirts and pants 5 days a week. Over the last 9 weeks of school, I'd gotten used to dressing myself and actually figuring out again what my individual fashion sense is. Some days I was completely stumped having to pick an outfit. It sounds silly but there's a lot of clothes I don't get to wear that often anymore. 

This past week was quiet around the school. It was reading week for all of the other full time programs, so just the apprenticeship blocks still had classes. I managed to actually get the use of a ping pong table, which I haven't played in years. We had a lot of time to kill on Friday, so we played nearly 2 hours. 

I'm definitely itching to get back to work. It will be nice to see what I've learned and how that will apply to the things I've been doing. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Back to School: Round 3, Week 8

Well this is it! The last week of learning before the next weeks exams. At this point, the focus on learning the last few things, and getting that last bit of practice before we get tested. Just when collectively we seem to be mingling more as a group, it's so soon going to come to an end. The Dean of the school came into one of our classes to gather feedback about the school environment and the curriculum. The electrical curriculum hasn't officially been updated since 2003. The technology has changed so much since then. The teachers have been great with staying up to date. However, with fairly strict guidelines as to what they have to teach, there isn't much time to deviate for new material. There was also an interesting discussion that came up about the school environment, specifically as a trades school. Generally, non-trades people won't notice or pay much mind to things like plumbing issues (toilets not working for long stretch of time), communication wires ...

Back to School: Round 3, Week 5

This week is the halfway point. After this, only 4 more weeks to go. On Monday, Graham and I swapped vehicles. After driving the truck, getting in the Civic was like watching a dog drag its butt across the floor, except I was the dog. It seemed like I should have been in Fast & the Furious, driving under tractor trailers. I digress... There were two test this week: PLC programming (I got an 87.06%) and Prints test (I got an 92.68%). I I had someone commend me this week for dealing with all the accident related stuff but still getting 80's and 90's for my grades. (Also got 100% on an Instrumentation assignment!) This has been Hump week: we are now at 4 more weeks to go before school is over. So it's really 3 more weeks of learning and a week of tests. WIth how busy I've been, I've had to drop any tutoring I wanted to do. I've had a minimum of 3 appointments a week, mostly after, sometimes during school. With missed classes I had enough of my own catch...

The "Social Impacts" of a Female Working with "Mostly Male Construction Workers"

The first time I'd heard anything about comments made by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was on Newstalk 1010' s The Night Side with Barb DiGiulio .  For reference, here is a section of the comments from Mr. Trudeau at the recent G20 summit as posted in an article from the National Post : " Even big infrastructure projects, you know, might now say, well, what does a gender lens have to do with building this new highway or this new pipeline or something? Well, you know, there are gender impacts when you bring construction workers into a rural area. There are social impacts because they’re mostly male construction workers. How are you adjusting and adapting to those?"    A lot of people are focusing specifically on the "social impacts... ...of mostly male construction workers" part in a negative light. I'd agree, it certainly doesn't sound good, does it? The resulting public interpretation of what that comment meant spinned the narrative to that of t...