Arriving Somewhere

I started riding the bus to work again. Yeah for public transportation! Boo to the guy sitting behind me on the way home who’s Nextel phone makes the bus sound like an arcade. And within days of beginning my twice-daily bus ride I caught a nasty cold. When I think about breathing the same air as all of those random people it makes me want to start wearing a mask.

On the flip side, I am able to read during trips… definitely a plus! I picked up my half-read copy of “The NextGen Librarian’s Survival Guide” by Rachel Singer Gordon and am enjoying it immensely.

I particularly liked her quote of Roy Tennant’s Library Journal article, “Strategies for Keeping Current”

“Learn all the time without even thinking about it. We are born to learn but somewhere along the way many of us pick up the idea that we must be taught in order to learn. We think that if someone doesn’t stand up in front of us and talk to us with either a chalkboard or PowerPoint slides, we cannot learn. We must regain our sense of wonder and our desire to learn.”

While some people may be natural self-learners (self-teachers?) the key is the “desire to learn”. This mirrors a conversation my wife and I had the other day. With the aid of Pimsleur CDs from our local public library, she’s teaching herself Italian. How cool is that!