Personal Learning Experiences
At the beginning of 100x, we were asked to reflect on learning experiences ranging from childhood in school to adulthood in the workplace.
Childhood
For some reason, I’m thinking about learning to play the violin in fourth grade. The district had a shared violin teacher who traveled around school to school, and I’m unsure what, if anything, he did outside of that. I was learning things like how to hold the bow, how to space your fingers, how to read music. I’m sure we sounded awful! It was a lot of repetition, though, and creating connections between things on paper (notes) and muscle memory (finger placement, bow movement). Violin was mandatory in our district for fourth graders, but I kept with it through high school.
High School or College
For this one, I’m thinking about a Spanish class I took in college where we read Don Quixote in its entirety over the course of the semester. It was so hard, trying to decipher the words as well as deeper meanings. It was a difficult but rewarding experience learning more Spanish in such an immersive way. The professor was an absolute Cervantes genius and a very patient, hilarious man. I took the class to complete my Spanish minor.
In the Workplace
I started my first professional position as a librarian just over a year ago and, despite having a graduate degree in library science, I felt very unprepared. In particular, I needed to learn were the tenets of evidence-based medicine. I enrolled in an online class taught by other librarians and through weekly readings, graded assignments, and self-assessments learned the material. The set up was actually pretty similar to edX. I was learning both theory and skills, such as critical appraisal of clinical studies.