Lesson One

Hi there! I'm Natalie- or cybergrrl- your instructor for this course. Welcome to the Instructor Blog, where I will be introducing each new lesson. When the lesson opens, you will start by reading over my post which won't appear until we arrive at that topic. So on Wednesday, you'll see the link for the Lesson 2 Overview and that will signal the start of a new lesson. You are welcome to follow some of the hyperlinks that are imbedded in the post if you are particularly interested in the content. You don't need to follow every link, but some of them are quite fascinating and make for great post material as well as juicy conversation fodder for next weekend's party.

I thought that some of you may want to know a little bit about your mysterious virtual instructor, so I'm going to use this space to introduce myself a bit. I am a transplant from Los Angeles , CA who moved to State College five years ago to pursue a doctorate degree in Women's Studies and Rural Sociology at Penn State University . I got my bachelors degree from the lovely University of California, Santa Barbara —I was a double major in Environmental Studies and Political Philosophy. I also have a masters degree from the less lovely but still stellar California State University, Los Angeles in Geography. I came to Penn State to study Amish women because I was having a really hard time finding them in South Central Los Angeles. I am specifically interested in birth and midwifery, so I started going out with a bunch of local midwives to prenatal visits and even to births. It's been brilliant, and I'll certainly talk more about what I've learned when we get to Lesson 9, our unit on birth and midwifery. I still go out to births, so if you happen to email me and you don't hear back in 24 hours, you can bet that I'm out at some Amish farm trying to figure out the propane lamp so we can see if the darn kid is even out yet.

So, as you know, Lesson One requires you to get familiar with the syllabus and the course website . I'm sure that it seems down right overwhelming to you right now, which is why I am giving you this time to figure it all out. If you put in an hour right this very minute, I guarantee that you will be praising yourself for the next 5 weeks while all the other slackers are cursing the heavens trying to decode the website navigation. So get to it. Visit all of the blogs, check out the message board, sign up for your assignments and just surf around. As always, I'm here if you have questions or need help.