No, there has been no emergency - and no real excuse - for not posting for almost the entire month of September. In part, it was due to the time change. The blog time is set for one time zone and I spent the early part of the month in another time zone six hours away. This generally meant that by the time I was ready to sit down and write something, I was already into the next day blog time. So I would rationalize by saying that I would write first thing in the morning. Of course, that never happened.
So, here we are, with the Autumn Equinox occurring during the past week. If I don't get myself in gear, the whole month will have passed SD by and we'll be in October. When did Time begin to pass so quickly? I can remember summers before I was teen-ager that seemed to last forever and a day, so that we were almost happy to begin a new school year just to have a routine again.
Ironically, I have begun an academic School Year this September, as has HWMBO. Each of us, however, is seeing things from a different perspective. I, on the one hand, have returned - somewhat - to my first career incarnation, i.e., teaching. But there is a small, welcome difference. I am teaching university-level students this time, rather than my most recent formal teaching experience of secondary students. Of course, I did also training sessions with adults before HWMBO and I met and married, but the training sessions were not strictly in an academic framework and were very much project-oriented. HWMBO, on the other hand, has returned to student life. He is auditing two courses at the local community college. He is, by far, the most senior member in his classes. Still he seems to be greatly enjoying the co-ed life. Both of us are enjoying the stimulation of young minds once again. But we still find ourselves on separate continents.
I returned to Switzerland earlier in September, so the time zone excuse - if it ever qualified as an excuse - no longer qualifies. But most of my time has been spent in research, preparation of lessons and in learning the mysteries of Powerpoint in order to transfer concepts to PPT slides to teach and repost on the university's intranet site. I can even insert hyperlinks into the slides so that the students can follow the links to the source sites. Meanwhile, HWMBO has been learning how to use his college's intranet, where the professor actually posts lectures and follow-up thoughts in addition to the regular class materials.
This new generation takes such marvels for granted. Both HWMBO and I can remember all too well the pre-xerox days of smeary "ditto" machines (carbons even!), when slide and overhead projectors were considered daringly avant-garde and a good supply of white-out was absolutely necessary. In those days, out-of-date films from the state film library - usually spliced and re-spliced ad nauseam so that they broke off in the film projector; no showing ever involved fewer than two stops and restarts - and recorded tapes were audio visual mainstays. We didn't even have video cassettes when I last formally taught, long ago in those "Dark" Ages. Now we have access to information even as it is being updated.
Sometimes I wonder, however, whether all this access to information leads more to information overload than to knowledge. I would like to believe that greater knowledge is indeed the end result, but I am not so sure.
In any event, my students and I have now all survived the first couple weeks. I've even been offered an additional class to teach, beginning in October. The wonderful thing is that this new "career" offers me the opportunity to continue living in my beloved little Swiss haven, just when I had thought that I really would have to face economic reality and leave.
I hope to enjoy The Dream as long as it can last. And SD will share that enjoyment with me, even when I am slow - even very slow - to post.
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