Not many people are aware of this, but I love libraries. In school, I used to love playing with the card catalog, trying to figure out how many different ways I could look up the same book. (I was a strange child.) When I was in high school, I worked in the school’s library for about a year. One of my jobs was to sort new cards into their proper place in the card catalog. I knew I’d hit the big time when the librarian let me start filing cards in the accession catalog!

Let’s just say I have fond memories of the old card catalog.

Yesterday, I stumbled across Pile of Index Cards, which I’m guessing is part of the whole Hipster PDA/GTD thing just from looking at the site. If you poke around the site a little bit, you’ll notice a filing system that would warm any card catalog enthusiast’s heart. (It certainly made me smile!)

I keep trying to go index card, but my limited living space has made it something of a challenge. Dead Bunny’s book is sequenced on index cards. I’m planning to organize this year’s NaNoWriMo attempt on index cards.

Maybe I could create my own card catalog…

Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 8:03 AM EDT

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Care to take a guess on what my least favorite word in the world is? Oh, good. You’ve read the headline.

I’m starting to think I’ve heard the word “overqualified” in the past five or six years than most people hear it ever, and I’m at the ripe old age of 32.

It all started when I set out on the path to become a museum educator. I started volunteering at a planetarium when I was eighteen. I got to help build rockets for the rocketry lab. I learned photography and slide construction so I could help build shows. I learned how to program the computer that ran our shows. I even hid out in the catwalk behind the dome and fixed a special effect while listening to a freshman astronomy lab. If there was a way to get involved, I did it. I was too new to do much more than run school shows and answer brief questions, but that was all right. I loved my work.

I moved on to become a demonstrator and interpreter at a nearby natural history museum, and then again to be an instructor at a regional history/science museum. I was doing my teacher prep program at that point, and my head was bursting with ideas for educational programs for the museum. When I went to the director of the education department and asked if I could throw something together, she was only too delighted to let me.

From there, it was attempt after attempt to land an internship, all the while gearing up to apply to grad school. In the same week, I was rejected from the program I really wanted to go to, rejected as a candidate for the director of education at a children’s museum that had pretty much courted me through the entire process (A gentleman was on both the grad school and the museum’s committee’s. I wondered if he knew during my director interview that I was not going to be allowed in to the graduate program.), offered an internship with a very well-known program, and accepted to my second choice graduate program. I went off to grad school, where I learned about all facets of museum science and worked in a poorly-lit office behind the production room, churning out workshops and special events. I even researched and wrote the introduction to a planetarium show.

I became sick my second semester of grad school, a case of sinusitis that I was never able to shake off. I made it through my classes, and then moved home. Back home, I couldn’t land a job in a museum to save my life. I applied for another director of education job a couple of hours from home, but they wanted a development person, not an educator. The rejection letter was lovely. It had the bugbear virus attached accidentally. Heh.

What I was hearing from the museums, what I had eventually heard as why I didn’t get into the first program I applied to, was that I was overqualified. I was twenty-six years old, and had more experience than my interviewers, or was just too experienced for the jobs I was applying for. It was frustrating.

I stumbled. I’d planned on being a museum educator, and had never once considered I couldn’t become one. I tried out a new career, editing for a test publishing company. Despite my fantastic editing skills, it didn’t work out. I wasn’t happy.

I moved and fell back into education, my first love. It hasn’t really fulfilled me the way creating educational programs for the museum world did, but it’s helped…sort of. I’m about as far as I can go without taking on a role I don’t want at work…and now there are whispers that I’m overqualified to do any of my jobs at work.

In only eight years, I became overqualified for the museum education field. In two, I became overqualified to work in a tutoring center (where I do  teaching, administrative, and supervisory work). Now I have my sights set on what I hope will end up becoming my career, and I’m worried that I’ll become overqualified there within five years. In fact, I’m moving really slowly in teaching myself their concepts in the hopes of trying to delay that once I finally figure out how to break in (which is proving to be a nightmare in its own right).

What do I do? I know I’ve put the plea out before, but I seriously need a mentor. Preferably one involved with educational media and curriculum development. Maybe someone else can find the answer I seem to keep overlooking.

Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 7:35 AM EDT

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This week’s blogging challenge invites bloggers to reveal what they’re passionate about. I’m so chock full of passion that it actually scares people away from me.

If it isn’t obvious, I’m passionate about teaching. I spent a couple of years not doing any sort of teaching at all, and then found myself in Minnesota as a counselor at a summer camp. After watching me growl at the world for two years, the friend who got me the job came to me a couple of days after I arrived at camp and commented that she’d never seen me happier. It was the push I needed to convince myself that I somehow or other needed to get myself back where I was teaching something.

Today, I’m a tutor. I’m writing a blog to help kids with math. (It should be off hiatus by the end of the month…if I can get a hold of a microphone.) I’m trying to figure out how to take my skills and re-shape them into a career in either educational media or educational gaming (or some combination of the two).

I’m also passionate about just helping people. This is probably evident from the variety of topics available on this blog. My philosophy is simple: If I know something that would help you, then I want to be able to share that with you. (Knowledge is  more useful when it’s shared.)

Lastly, I’m passionate about learning. I’m always looking to learn. Currently, my self-study list includes educational media, game development, information architecture, writing, graphic design, and Montessori.

If you ever find yourself bored, hunt me down on IM (I’m kirylin on most services.) and ask me about animation or chocolate, or give me a random problem to solve. I can apparently talk intelligently at great length about all three. (I’m fairly well-versed on a number of topics. These just come up the most.)

Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 7:37 AM EDT

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Many people think that writing is all about getting your message out into the world. People write so that others can read. After all, that’s what we’re taught in school, right? We gather ideas and put them together in a format that will elicit high marks from a teacher. We’re asked to demonstrate some form of reflection in those academic pieces, but are those reflections raw conclusions that we’ve drawn, or are we just writing what we think the teacher wants to hear.

Sometimes while working on those papers, we realize our thinking goes down a completely different path than what we’re supposed to be writing. More often than not, those thoughts just get pushed aside in the desire to just wrap up the paper. What would happen if they were captured in a reflective journal for future pondering? What would happen if wre gave ourselves permission to think for ourselves over material we’re working with?

I sometimes forget that a large part of why I started blogging after having an online journal for a year is because I wanted to record what I was seeing and react to it. I wanted someplace to store all of the advice I was repeatedly giving out to friends and family. I really just wanted somewhere to record the thoughts stuck in my head in an attempt to get them out of my head before they were lost. (Why didn’t I do any of this with my online journal? Mostly, it was because I never took that online journal seriously.)

Getting ideas out of your head and into some other medium makes it far easier to work with them. You can share the stories lodged in your head without being there. You can organize and reorganize research and plans without worrying about forgetting something (unless you accidentally delete something). Writing is a tool that allows you to focus, but also enables you to share.

Start with a simple spiral notebook and write down everything. Don’t feel compelled to impose a structure on it (unless you feel more comfortable with structure). If low-tech isn’t your way, then there is some great note-capturing software (including my favorite, EverNote) to help you record and organize your thoughts to your heart’s content.

This post triggered by Rosa Say and Joanna Young.

Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 7:35 AM EDT

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