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Monday, Sept. 01, 2003 - 1:16 p.m.
Busy reading
I haven't read any books for 2 days, but I have been doing extra reading on the internet. I attempted to read all the journals on Autumn Leaves today. I have some that I read every day, but some are very hard to load on my computer and after a while I just don't try anymore. Also went to the SS website and read up on retirement. It looks like I might be able to retire early with a reduced payment and then switch over to 800's if he should die. That could be a good thing but I would rather have him here. Who would put on my winter tires, air up the lawn mower, check the oil, and bug the neighbors? I am also exploring what the next 3 years of reduced income will do to my payments. Plus I need to see if I can still get retraining if I take early retirement (I think not) I am looking into Electronic Office Specialist. That has a lot fewer general credits to accumulate than the Library Science. Two of the team leaders have called me and asked for math help on their class homework. My immediate lab boss is really needing help in her class. She has used a calculator so long that she doesn't know her times tables and how to do long division. We spent 2 hours on the phone just learning the routine of long division. Graph paper and doing estimates is helping some, and she made out a times table chart as I suggested. I hate to think of what will happen when she hits fractions. She said the college is looking for Math and English tutors and has asked all the students to tell the people who are helping them to please call the school. They will pay $8 an hour and the tutor sets his own hours. That may be a possibility. I may as well get paid for doing something I think I will be doing a lot of. Most of the people I work closely with who are going back to school know that I taught for years and have already asked if they can call when they are stuck. I like to tutor. Just jump in where there is a problem then jump back out. I can do that easily in English and also in Math, but in Math, once I get to linear equations, graphs, slopes, etc. I have to break out the books and refresh myself right along with the student. The best tutoring advice I can give is setting up the parameters for learning Math or English. Rules, rules, and rules. Order and careful attention to details take a person a long way with subjects that involve learning skills and then advancing to the next skill level. I learned that when I became a Teen Supervisor. Wish I had applied that advice to myself when it was my time. But time was the only thing I had back then. All the other resources needed for further education were missing. Besides that, wasn't it Mark Twain who said, "Education is wasted on the young."? Sounds like him. I know he said that boys ought to be put into barrels and fed through the barrel bung til they were 18 then hammer in the bung. What a bitter fellow he was in some of his writing. I wonder if that was his real nature or just a satirical way of looking at things. Another book I have been reading is Isak Dinesen's biography by Judith Thurman. The movie Out of Africa seems like a false portrayal of her and others close to her after reading the biography which uses alot of her own writings. She was part of that whole era of psuedo-intellectuals who camped out in Europe. The Gertrude Stein group, altho I don't know whether Dinesen was ever actually there, just the mindset. But maybe I am just not intellectual enough to understand that mindset. In any case, to me they seemed to throw away the foundations of civilization and common-sense and live in an imaginary world of their own invention, whether it worked or not. I guess every era has its own version of the Beat generation. I must admit that the film of her life seemed much nicer that the actual facts in the book. That is probably the case of most things like that. We like to look through rose colored glasses. Another topic that has caught my interest lately has been the period of English history before, during and after Elizabeth I. A man named Tradescant who created gardens for several of the nobility gave us a rich legacy of roses and other plants that carry his name. He was also involved in a lesser way with the tulip craze of that period, when bulbs became the currency of the time. Thousands of dollars were being spent for just one bulb, and great auctions were held. Then the market just crashed, with people realizing that these bulbs were not the wealth they had been making them out to be. What is the worthless wealth we are measuring life with in this age?
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