frags from the mirror

[...]

I am rebellious; I do not want to be this or that. Even scarier is the documented undertaking of claiming to identify the people in a particular field of interest/study/ practice as being charted in one sector/learning style over other ones. It smacks of control not understanding for the goal of assisting learning and cooperation.

[...]

Constructivist learning and teaching: this was not my introduction. I learn. You learn. Our learning builds upon our own and each others learning.

I have learned elsewhere that crazy stress like I have been experiencing is common during significant learning. Stress test results for the past year showed work-related stress off the top of the chart (not surprising considering my back-to-back job termination and apartment bldg fire and all the related); both non-work and chronic work-related stress were also high. No surprise to me.

[...]

As an adult learner, I feel that real goals, targets, objectives validate the effort committed by learners. Adults forced into retraining by, say, the economic collapse of the town giant—the mill, the mine, the factory, the institution—around which everything else developed and sustained itself, often find themselves in the difficult position of retraining for lower paying jobs than the one they previously held.

My personal goal in deciding to go to graduate school, something significantly more ambitious than a basic retraining, has been to get out of the cycle or rut I have been in. Going to graduate school in education should enable me to build upon my thirty years of arts experience and countless workshops and presentation in classrooms and elsewhere by extending my personal capacities and possibilities. I am trying to remake myself, based upon my lived experience, in someone more than just a poet–artist but into a more critically conscious and contributing educator.

I know there is considerable accommodating being done and to be done on my part but it pales in relation to the ache and turmoil I sometimes, but most definitely do not always feel, in my head and body as I process the volumes of material, concepts and theories in multiply courses simultaneously.