Entries Tagged 'school' ↓

This article is wonderful for anyone who often finds themself in a teaching / training position. Oh, if only more faculty would follow these wonderful guidelines.

Ten Tips for New Trainers / Teachers

Cumulative GPA: 3.96

It was the first term did me in, and in particularly, one horrible partner. Oh well, them’s the breaks. I don’t think school grades are any indication at all of how intelligent someone is or how successful they’ll be, but gosh darn it I just spent two years and lots of moneys to get that degree and I want to brag a little bit!

Also it means I can disregard those horrible dreams I’d been having about completely messing up a final assignment, or missing some sneaky assignment entirely. That will be nice. The best reward, of course, is simply being done with school.

City lights glowing through the blizzard;
the air infused with falling faerie
dancing gently down to rest in piles
among their silent brethren.

Twenty minutes through the blizzard,
or through the sunny cold,
or the tepid spring;
that walk to class down
charming city streets.

The closeness of the east,
one city piled atop another;
this family of cities
that I never took the time to see.

Energy. Frenetic energy built
around community; the
we-are-all-in-this-together-ness
that made each word bearable.
The thrill of the hunt,
bringing down that big assignment so
we could feast during winter.

And more, perhaps. Perhaps more
than I can say. But
I can say,
Oh, things,

how I long to miss you.

In the grand tradition.

There once was a library lad
who wanted to graduate, bad.
He wrote every essay,
but oh what a mess, eh?
There always were more to be had.

It’s not entirely accurate because at this point the end is certainly in sight (I’ll be HOME in about a month), but there is still plenty of residual “this-will-never-end” feeling to last me for awhile.

On the upswing, things are going well with my application process, and I have a videoconference interview coming up … on my birthday. After the phone interview, this is another first for me, so it’s exciting but I’m a little nervous about it as well. Maybe one day they’ll even want to meet me.

To wrap up, I’d like to drop in part of what I wrote over at La Casa today, because sometimes even I can appreciate my own writing, and because where I stand on creating comics is also where I stand on creating any content; perhaps most topically, it’s where I stand on self-creation, on developing one’s self as a human being, as an artist (of any kind), as a friend, as a lover, and as a professional. The idea is that we create something of worth and offer it to the world; ideally, something unique that we’ve learned, through introspection and hard work, how to offer.

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the kind of comic I want to create. La Casa has been a journey - no, an experiment, really. It’s been a ride. It’s been something, anyway, but a lot of times I don’t know where to go with it, and I don’t know if it’s the story that I want to tell. There are thousands of comics out there, all of them telling stories, all of them with their own worth and audience and humor, and I’m happy that ours has been one of them, but at the same time I somehow want to find a way to make our comic different. I want to find the story that will be our comic, the characters that will drive the story, the merge between art and writing that will, at the very least, be uniquely ours. I’m really not talking about popularity, just the idea that in creating content and putting it out there for people to see, one has a responsibility to make that content … worth something. To somebody.

We start with a dream, and one by one pluck down the stars to light our path.

We start with a dream …

Graham over at The Inspired Library School Student asked me to write a guest post for him about how student associations at library schools can help to keep LIS students interested and inspired throughout their studies. It’s my first guest post, so that’s exciting, and I actually managed to get it to him fairly quickly.

Go check it out!