I'm in a posting mood today. This probably won't have anything substantial to it and I reserve my right as a blogger to have posts where I just ramble.
First off - this is funny. Even for people like myself that know almost nothing about Star Trek (Captain Kirk, Captain Picard, Spock, Data, the Enterprise, The Final Frontier... yup, that's about all of it) will enjoy the joke.
Today I ended up working with one of my classmates and I am very grateful I did. I am having the hardest time with this capstone thing for my end-of-master's-program wrap-up. The professor keeps harping about applying theory to what we've learned in this program. Only problem is that we talked about theory in the first semester and then it was never heard from again. And with good reason - in the real world, there's no such thing as "theory." Either something works or it doesn't and no amount of academic bull-s****ing will make it work (just ask the Soviet Union. Oh wait...). In my entire academic career, I have treated theory as something nice to look at and something that makes you feel important when someone else says it but when I say it, I sound like a pretentious little snot-nosed student that no one will ever take seriously. So, instead of spouting off a bunch of researchers' BS, I just call it like I see it (using my own terms and my own experiences) and it works out just fine. People know I'm being honest and real with them and they know that I have internalized what I was supposed to learn rather than who supposedly thought of it first.
So back to work tonight - my classmate said that he really didn't understand the whole thing about "theory" because we never covered it (which is good to hear because I was freaking out when I heard we were all of a sudden expected to know what it was) and besides, this is just a one-credit class and once it's over, we've passed everything and we can go get awesome librarian jobs and do something real in the world.
(hey, I like that term - "do something real." Sound much more proactive that just sitting around "doing good." Because "real" and "good" are not mutually exclusive. Hmm... I'm going to hang on to that one for a while).
Anyway, theory be damned - I know I learned something significant (and real) in this program. Whether or not I can spout off a bunch of pretentious, pipe-smoking professors who wrote papers about the concepts is another story (and, really, I'm never going to have a five-year-old ask me who came up with the theory of library usage. More likely they'll be asking for an Elephant and Piggie book).
First off - this is funny. Even for people like myself that know almost nothing about Star Trek (Captain Kirk, Captain Picard, Spock, Data, the Enterprise, The Final Frontier... yup, that's about all of it) will enjoy the joke.
Today I ended up working with one of my classmates and I am very grateful I did. I am having the hardest time with this capstone thing for my end-of-master's-program wrap-up. The professor keeps harping about applying theory to what we've learned in this program. Only problem is that we talked about theory in the first semester and then it was never heard from again. And with good reason - in the real world, there's no such thing as "theory." Either something works or it doesn't and no amount of academic bull-s****ing will make it work (just ask the Soviet Union. Oh wait...). In my entire academic career, I have treated theory as something nice to look at and something that makes you feel important when someone else says it but when I say it, I sound like a pretentious little snot-nosed student that no one will ever take seriously. So, instead of spouting off a bunch of researchers' BS, I just call it like I see it (using my own terms and my own experiences) and it works out just fine. People know I'm being honest and real with them and they know that I have internalized what I was supposed to learn rather than who supposedly thought of it first.
So back to work tonight - my classmate said that he really didn't understand the whole thing about "theory" because we never covered it (which is good to hear because I was freaking out when I heard we were all of a sudden expected to know what it was) and besides, this is just a one-credit class and once it's over, we've passed everything and we can go get awesome librarian jobs and do something real in the world.
(hey, I like that term - "do something real." Sound much more proactive that just sitting around "doing good." Because "real" and "good" are not mutually exclusive. Hmm... I'm going to hang on to that one for a while).
Anyway, theory be damned - I know I learned something significant (and real) in this program. Whether or not I can spout off a bunch of pretentious, pipe-smoking professors who wrote papers about the concepts is another story (and, really, I'm never going to have a five-year-old ask me who came up with the theory of library usage. More likely they'll be asking for an Elephant and Piggie book).
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