More Schoolin'

The class I'm taking this semester is about user instruction, which means it's really an introduction to teaching theories and methods. And, of course, some actual teaching. I avoid getting in front of a crowd to speak whenever possible and even if you meet me on a one-on-one basis, I'm really quiet. Needless to say, I'm counting down the days until the class is over.

I'm in the process of working on my final project for the class. It's a 45 minute lesson on something involving the library science field I want to go into once I graduate. Since my areas of interest are special libraries and archives (which, coincidentally, has the least amount of user instruction) it's a bit harder to figure out what I want to teach. The other people in my class are all going into school media centers, academic libraries or public libraries (which all involve lots and lots of user instruction), so they've been doing the usual "This is how the catalog works, etc, etc." The only other archives student in my class made up an archive (that specialized in artifacts relating to pirates, yar!) and went over the rules and how to use a finding aide. I'm going to focus on corporate libraries and do a re-interpretation of a presentation that I've sat through at work.

And because of my procrastinating ways, I have two weeks to pull it together. I'm hoping to get a large part of it done this weekend while the weather is certainly un-springlike. As I type this, I'm watching the falling snow being whipped around by the wind. It's April! At least the snow isn't sticking. If the weather was nicer, I'd be seriously tempted to go out and find my first letterbox of the year now that most of the snow has melted. I have a serious itch to go letterboxing, but haven't been able to all winter since we've had a continuous snow cover since December. If I get enough work done this week, maybe I'll escape out to the woods next weekend and find a box or two. If not, then I'll get my fix at the Northern Iowa gathering in May and the Great Lakes gathering at the end of May. I don't know how much 'boxing I'll get to do as the host of the gathering, but that whole week is going to be like one big party for me. There's Memorial Day on Monday, my birthday on that Thursday, and then the gathering on Saturday. Maybe I'll finally break 300 finds for my birthday!

Enough procrastinating for now...