Confused by that Newfangled Internet Thingy

Remember when I decided to go back to school to become a teacher? And how excited I was about buying school supplies and paying tuition? Yeah, I'm getting over it.

I got a call from the university this morning to let me know that a class I really wanted to take had an opening in one of the online sections, and did I want to enroll? Of course I did! This was the one class I was really bummed about not getting to take right away, and while I had never taken an online class before I figured that at least this meant I wouldn't have to commute to campus more than once a week. Saving gas is good! The woman at the university gave me some kind of code (note: I didn't bother finding out what the code was for, just wrote it down in my day planner) and told me that she'd e-mail me more details about the online program.

Now, either she was incredibly busy this morning or I'm an idiot, because her e-mail made no sense whatsoever. It was an e-mail that had originally been sent to the course's instructor and said nothing specific about what a student had to do in order to navigate the online course software. One of the links in the e-mail seemed somewhat helpful, though, so I followed it to the massive, scary University of Texas System page.

Disclaimer: as a general rule, I think that I'm a fairly savvy internet-type person. I have a blog, I know a little HTML (watch how I can make my words bold or underlined), and I can order a pizza from the comfort of my laptop. I'm not an IT professional by any stretch of the imagination, but I tend to understand how to do things on a computer. I'm apparently not as knowledgeable as I thought though, because I have no freaking clue what I'm supposed to do in order to access my class online. I can't even figure out what day it starts!

After spending a good 45 minutes battling panic over not being able to figure out the stupid software (or even how to log in) I sent a mea culpa e-mail to the woman at the university who had originally sent me the supposedly "explanatory" e-mail, begging for some guidance. At the very least, I need to know what this stupid code means! I hope (fingers crossed) that the reason I'm having so many problems is that the university hasn't had time to formally register me for the class yet, so my usual logins and passwords aren't working.

In any case, I'm having flashbacks to my one recurrent college nightmare, in which I discover that I signed up for a class without realizing it, haven't been attending all semester, the final is TODAY, and if I fail, I'll ruin my GPA. I feel completely unprepared and clueless, and it's not pleasant.