Monday, November 5, 2007

Please Focus on the Show....

One of the afternoon radio shows I occasionally listen to uses this sound clip when they get callers who go off on weird tangents that don't relate to what's going on with the show. As I thought about my learning process this week that quote seems ever so accurate...

This past week was incredibly difficult for me. I came back to work after traveling to Reno knowing that I was traveling to Williamsburg on Thursday and had a lot to do to catch up at work and also prepare for the conference. I was also trying to finish a baby blanket for my newest grandniece who I would be meeting for the first time after the conference. I've been dealing with a lot of lack of motivation lately and having all this going on did not help.

On top of that on Wednesday evening our office lost one of our colleagues, a person who edited the Learning Page, coordinated our summer workshops before I took them over and someone who created a lot of instructional materials for teachers. She also started working with me when I started teaching our first searching workshop to make that workshop "teacher friendly". She was someone who encouraged my decision to start working less with archives and reference and more with education. This colleague was extremely pleased that I was taking education classes to be able to learn more "teacher lingo" and about the classroom experience. So needless to say instead of wanting to do any reading about authentic learning I really wanted to spend time with my family and friends and be supportive of my office colleagues.

When I decided to start reading I really had to work hard to focus. Instead of just reading and underlining items that I felt were important to remember I actually started writing summary notes at the tops of articles and along the sides of paragraphs so I would remember what I had just read. When I started to drift off I would mentally yell at myself to focus. I don't normally study like this but I was absolutely desperate for anything that would keep me focused on what I was reading. When I really got off track I grabbed a writing pad and just started writing everything I was thinking about on the pad from ideas for the class blog entries to my desire to work on a prayer shawl for my colleague's daughter. Writing things down really seemed to help and I was able to get several of the articles read for this evening's class.

My next blog entry will focus on answering some of the questions you asked in your questions about my learning processes

No comments: