Christmas is about 3 days away right now. I am looking forward to spending time with my siblings, parents and nieces and nephews, including my new new Padraig! Padraig will be about 3 weeks old at the end of this week so this is is his first Christmas! My class was great and I am looking forward to a new class in January – Online Sources and Searches. I will also be taking a class for my certification in classroom management. I am not looking forward to that one quite as much, but it is a step in the process and hopefully I will complete it and get on to the big hurdle – passing the math test!
November 21, 2009
MEETING GLEN BECK!!
I got a chance to meet Glen Beck today and it was very exciting! I think even more exciting was being with people who are like-minded about our country, the direction we are going and what needs to be done about it. I was feeling rather negative about the country, but we might still have hope if even people wake up and see what is going on! Glen Beck was totally wonderful and very kind. The whole store was filled with his supporters and people were out the door of the store waiting for a chance to have him sign his book. He is going to the Villages today to unveil his new plan. He will also be talking about it on Monday! I hope that we can turn this country around and back to freedom – God first, family second and country third – but God bless America – please, before it’s too late.
November 21, 2009
Greek class
I almost forgot-I am hoping to start Greek class in December. There is a parishioner at Seminole Presbyterian that will be offering a class in Biblical Greek. I am sure it will be difficult, especially with everything else I am doing, but I don’t really want to wait to learn some Greek if I can! I will be taking Online Sources and Searches in the spring and a classroom management class online through TEA. I hope to take the math test in April or May, but will have to study quite a bit to do that. I will have to take a wait and see attitude toward math, but it will have to be done before the end of 2010.
November 21, 2009
Thanksgiving week
I am more or less finished with My Intro to Library Administration class. It has been a very challenging class with much discussion on the discussion boards and for me, a look into my present job and how I can use it to transition in the future to the library world. My job right now is “administration” and “management” and I need to look at it as such. I especially enjoyed reading the works of Robert Greenleaf on servant-leadership. This model truly does give flesh to Jesus words, “I came to minister, no be ministered unto” (not exact quote). I hope my paper did justice to his work, which was a lifetime of contemplation and action. I’ll have to post how I did on the class – maybe not as well as others, but hopefully at least a B!
New school year begins next week August 14, 2009
My summer break will soon be over and before I mourn the loss of it, I should say that overall it was a very productive time for me. I have 18 hours in the library science program and about 18 more to go. It seems to be taking forever to get through this degree but patience is a virtue and one I need to cultivate. I just finished an excellent book by David Bentley Hart called The Doors of the Sea. This book talks about the tsunami that happened back in 2004 and asks where was God in the midst of all of this devastation? It is a wonderful, thoughtful and rather short book that answers this question in a beautiful way. I start back to school next week, 8 days before the students start and though I kind of dread it, I suppose my life will take on much more structure during the fall term than it has during the summer. This is not a bad thing, but I must work hard to maintain some semblance of balance, which tends to quickly go out the window once school starts. My new class for the fall is Library Administration. I’ll try to write more consistenly this fall.
Summer school nearly over July 9, 2009
Summer school 2009 has one more week. Then I have approximately 4 weeks to prepare for the beginning of the school year and then USF starts for me again on August 24th. It has been a busy summer with lessons, church work and school. I look forward to a little more downtime after August 18th, but not too much. I have a lot of work left this summer and I hate to waste it! Trying to work my way through Liberty and Tyranny by Mark Levin and The Unseen Warfare. I am also trying to slow down and not speed through books so quickly. Also this summer I want to get through the book by Sergei Schemann about life in a Russian village. Should be interesting!
Three more weeks! July 1, 2009
Summer school will soon be wrapping up and I will have about four weeks after that to get ready for school in the fall. It has been a good summer so far and pretty restful. I have enjoyed staying home and working on my classes, for the most part. I hope to get some reading and practicing in in the coming weeks. I have many books to read right now (for pleasure) and hopefully I will get to some of them. This has been an intense summer term, but I feel like I have learned much, especially from the Basic Info. class.
Summer 2009 June 16, 2009
Since this is the summer, I decided that now would be a good time to take this blog in another direction. I read (or peruse) many books and I would like to remember what I liked or did not like about them. I get many books through Inter-Library Loan and so have to look at them quickly and return them. Recently I read a book that I have long wanted to read
Touching Heaven: Discovering Orthodox Christianity on the Island of Valaam, by John Oliver. John Oliver’s book is a journey of self-discovery as he travels to the Valaam Monastery in Russia to help with a renovation project. I enjoyed the book and even liked his writing style, though I note that some people at Amazon were kind of irritated by the way he writes. I have heard Father Oliver on Ancient Faith Radio and I enjoy his podcasts. He has really come a long way from being an Orthodox inquirer to an Orthodox priest and his talks are always stimulating and thought-provoking. Read this book if you like partial autobiographies and descriptions of far away places.
Summer school again! May 24, 2009
Summer school starts for me at the end of my spring term with the school system. We have approximately 7 or 8 days left - 7 days left with the students and one post-planning day. I will be in my third week of summer school when Blake High is out for the summer. I am taking Basic Information Sources and Music Informatics – it will be an intense summer with lots of reading and assignments. I am looking forward to some time off but at this point I don’t know how much time off it will be!
Music Information Sources March 14, 2009
My spring class, Music Information Sources, is well underway. We are doing a great deal of reading on music information, technology, the future of music, music and brain research, etc. I am required to do a paper on one of the subjects and I have chosen technology, the library and the future of music education. There is so much on technology in library right and most of it is aimed at how to help the learner acquire knowledge in new ways. It is certainly an exciting time to be alive and see all the changes in how music education is being delivered. Hopefully I can explore some of it in my paper.
