O Blog, Thou Art Sick

I have neglected my poor blog, and the less I write the less it is read. (I have also been reading others' blogs less.) I am unsure if I will keep blogging in the future. I suppose I will see what happens this summer.*

I am nearly done with graduate school. On Friday I had my last lecture in 508--The History of Recorded Information. There are still two more weeks of classes, but those will be taken up by student presentations. And yesterday, I had my last class with Nancy Pearl in Readers Advisory. I am nearing the end--and I do mean The End. All I see is a great abyss in front of me. (The world may have survived yesterday, but we still have 2012 to get through.) Anyway, aside from my presentation, I also have a 20 page paper to write for 508. My topic is on Charles Dickens as the professional author and serial publication in the Victorian Age as manifested primarily by David Copperfield (and The Pickwick Papers). I have been able to handle the original monthly issues of David Copperfield which are held by UW's Special Collections. I need to finish my research this week, and then pound out a 20 page paper the week after. I hope I can still do it; I haven't had to write a paper that long since 2007 during my final undergraduate semesters at SUU.

I have been very disheartened by my experience with the iSchool and the UW and academia at large, but I really haven't been able to express my dissatisfaction. On Friday's class though, I had an epiphany as represented by Walt Whitman and Melvil Dewey. My personal experience with my high school and undergraduate education was Whitmanesque: expansive, embracing, affirming.** However, my experience with the Information School has been Deweyan, which is to say monomaniacal. It is a trend I fear is taking place in education at all levels--learning is a business with a focus on test scores and analytical intelligence. Where is the critical thinking? Where are the arts? Where is the humanism? In the end I have been buried in debt, and I wonder "Have I grown intellectually? Have I been prepared [for the MLIS is a professional degree] to be a librarian?" I really don't know.

*Speaking of the summer, I will be moving back in with my parents in June (education and the economy are in fantastic shape!). I am, however, excited to be back in Utah, for a while anyway. (And, also, I might just miss Seattle, but just barely.) I keep forgetting that it will not be summer vacation--a stasis in my personal and academic-now-professional life spent drinking iced coffees and reading books by the pool--it will be consumed by job hunting (my least favorite thing in the world), and hopefully before the summer's over I will have a real-life, professional, adult job--somewhere--and be moving again (my second least favorite thing in the world).

**I just wanted to quote the first and last stanzas of Leaves of Grass (the 1855 edition):

I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease . . . observing a spear of summer grass.

. . .

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop some where waiting for you.