7 1/2 Habits

A stark reality set in when I finally graduated last winter with my master's degree. From graduation day forward, I was responsible for my own learning. There were no more professors to serve me prepackaged, preservative-laced fundamental gold nuggets of knowledge. No more opportunities to flesh out my ideas in a 20-page research paper. Gone with the required reading; gone with the late night study session; gone with the degree plan with its strictures and limitations. I finally had a choice, a realistic opportunity to say "I want to learn about (insert interesting topic here) ." While I love the fact that there is a surplus of information-ready brain space, sometimes I get overzealous and try to cram an entire lifetime of learning into one session. I want to devour an entire book and expect to retain all of it, but don't really know what I'm going to do with the information once I have it. That's where my problems start. Without an end goal in mind, I often lose the information just from lack of use. In order to retain knowledge, you must put it into practice and recall it on a consistent basis. (Okay, so maybe I did hold on to some of my Theories of Learning and Cognition class from 1999.) I'll read, and watch, and learn, but in the end am I not really just full of useless information until I can put what I know into practice?

Here goes something....

I have been wanting to start a blog for the longest time, but this is my first shot. This lack of motivation is partly to the fact that it has been less than a year that I've had a brain of my own. It takes a while to digest the information deluge that comes with library science school, and for some time I feared that I'd lost my ability to form words into interesting sentences. I tire of regurgitating Ivory Tower babble. I've found that maybe, somewhere, my own rhetoric exists and is eleqouently screaming for my mouth, or in this case hands, to cooperate. So, here goes something...