A time to be silent....

     The most invisible aspect of this world is the mind of a person- until they open their mouth.
-The Castle Lady

     For those of you who might be unaware of why you haven't been seeing a lot of output from me this year, thus far, I wanted to tell you all about what is happening right now and give you a possible idea of what to expect in the near future. Beginning in February of this year I re-entered the world of career college for the third time in my life and by the mid-point of 2013 will have a degree in Graphic Arts if everything goes as planned. It's been a long period of time between my last class at a city college university and this year so it's probably not necessary for me to go on about the difficulty of having my daily routine thrown to the wind or getting back into a modus operandi of absorbing knowledge quickly rather than at my own pace which varies. Perhaps my memories of those days are a bit nostalgic- in the best sense of the word. Learning is a manifold process but I've discovered that I have become very set in my ways of my mode of learning as opposed to the fast track way in which higher education school systems choose to teach and that is all-inclusive of any age, gender or cultural heritage.

     Libraries now regularly have noisy interactive sessions for pre-school age children that send serious scholars scampering away from libraries in droves. Allowance of cell phone usage, video game interaction on the available computers and a general non-enforcement of the age-old quiet rule seems to be prevalent- to my chagrin. I know I'm not alone in being perturbed but no one else seems to be willing to speak up. Noise tolerance is becoming a real chore and disturbance and distraction is no longer confined to libraries but any place where silence is generally preferred over noise. Whatever may be said about interactive learning I cannot believe that anyone can learn anything by talking over the instruction. I don't know who originally quoted this but it bears repeating: No one ever learned anything without spending at least one half of their time listening.

     My first course back in February was Psych 101 and I was very interested in taking this as a first course because it happened to be my favorite in high school. I figured that it would be a great refresher course and perhaps I would learn something new along the way since I hadn't taken any Psychology courses in college. As it turned out I had taken on most of the information independently through the years according to my own interests. Left brain/Right brain theories were explored and some of the information resembled Earl Nightingale pep-talk courses I have perused through audiobooks over the years. Some information was new to me but most of it was knowledge I had already acquired through self-study. A revelation to me as I looked around the classroom were the number of female students who wanted to talk about anything else but the course materials and primarily themselves while the minutes and hours ticked away. Instead of listening to the professor (which was delivered by him in a very engaging and contemporary style, I must add) we were often just sitting around listening to someone's hard luck story instead of the subject matter. I pored over the book at night in my free time and was pleasantly surprised. However, to be honest, I certainly didn't sign on to listen to cult of personality mishmash and I'm certain no one else did either.

     Nothing much was said by the prof throughout that four week course until the last week and by then it was rather late in the day to say anything about how disrespectful this bunch of magpies really were. I kept hearing him tell them how smart they all were while key people either floundered or just tried to muddy on by themselves in the proverbial quiet desperation most people endure in such situations. It didn't phase me because I had already explored all those ideas and I'm a writer. It was easy for me to do most of the work in my free time while the classroom magpies carried on. I'm not surprised that my fellow group research buddies dumped the project on me because getting anything accomplished in that environment was next to impossible. It wasn't without resentment that I handed in the paper with my name and two other persons who did none of the actual research, typing the paper to format or any of the actual writing work at all. Overall I'd have to say I really need to get more assertive about delegating chores to people. I'll have to do it someday so I probably should start pulling my mitts on now.

     Perhaps I should tell you that my writing will be a little less than my usual prolific output but I don't want to mislead you in any way. I may start actually writing something on this particular blog every day, in fact. Just don't make any bets concerning the near future- in speaking or writing I make it count or I don't say anything at all.

The Castle Lady

with affection of a quality that has no fear of time !