school daze

I've been at this academy for a little over a week now and I've hit my limit... my brain is full, can I go home now? Actually, it's not that bad, but today was nothing but classes. For those of you who may not be familiar with military training, just about every lesson is taught by the lecture method. Now, since we're all professionals, most of our classes are actually taught using the "informal lecture" method with lots of class participation. Well, sometimes that happens and sometimes it doesn't. Today's classes were full of good information... they were just looooong! We only had three lessons and it took all day to get through them. Oh, and of course there's a test scheduled covering all this material. When's the test? Monday... 6:30 (am). Oh, speaking of tests... we took our first comprehensive exam ("comp") yesterday. Fifty questions covering the lessons we were taught last week. I scored a 98% on it which means I missed one stupid question. You know, I thought I did, and as soon as my faculty advisor told me what my score was I knew what question I'd missed, too. Oh well. I'll just have to make sure that's the last question I miss on a comp if I want to make the honor roll (top 3) and have a chance at winning the sword awarded to the Marine with the highest GPA at the end of the course. Maybe I should stop typing on this blog and get to studying...



Let me just catch a quick nap first...

PME

What? What the heck does "PME" stand for? It stands for Professional Military Education. It's when the Marine Corps sends you to a training academy to fine tune your skills and knowledge in general topics that are important for your current pay grade. The idea is that this will make you a better staff sergeant (in this case) and prepare you for future promotion. I checked in on Wednesday and we did our welcome aboard briefings yesterday. That included a round robin introduction of the segment of the class that I will spend the most time with... my platoon. As we introduced ourselves I couldn't help but notice that I was the senior staff sergeant in the room... by a lot. Hopefully, with God's help, I'll do well at this academy and be able to get promoted this year. I got my picutre taken and I'm already enrolled in the non-resident course for the next higher grade. The only hiccup is that this school doesn't graduate until April 14 and the promotion board begins April 18, which is not a lot of time for me to get things entered into the reporting system we have before they lock the doors. Still, if I manage to get in the top 3 of the class (there's 93 of us) then I'll get a special commendatory report, which will definitely look good. I must admit, I'm a little nervous about the rigors of this PT, but there are several in the class who finished behind me at yesterday's PFT (see my other blog about that) so I should be okay there. I'm not worried about passing this academy... I want to win. I'm not good at much, but I am gifted mentally and it would be wrong of me to not put my one good talent to use when afforded the opportunity, don't you think?