inching towards readiness

The past bunch of months have been busy ones. I have been snowed under with, starting last semester:

• big, giant assignments in each of my courses
• and then exams
• and then ridiculously busy holidays
• and then the start of school all over again for the new semester

I was barely able to get a breath in there, but things are now coasting in a way where I can reflect and research again, and that feels great. But whoops! Did the bottom ever fall out of this blog for a while.

So, this semester is also busy. I am taking the second half of our research class, and doing a wonderful project on perceptions of safety and how they affect kids' outdoor play, with some stellar group-mates. There is the assessment course where we are focusing on authentic assessment, tools, and critiquing "standardized" testing - it's awesome. I start the week off with a 3 hour class on children and learning with technology, very fun and very profound - with the prof that I'm working on the research project(s) with (thank you Jason), where we are writing our own blog with all the whole class of 40-odd ECE students. It isn't public (yet) but there is some REALLY interesting thinking coming out of there.

I got kicked out of a class due to timetable conflicts (not rabble-rousing) on children in society, and the only class that worked was a class about health promotion and community development on Mondays at 6.30pm, making that day super-long. I was dreading that class a bit, but then it turns out to be absolutely dynamic, interesting and thought provoking filled with great people and a great prof. SURPRISE!

And last but certainly not least - its placement time. I am spending two days a week this semester at the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care - an advocacy group working to secure real, necessary funding for child care in  the province. It is REALLY CRAZY AWESOME, and I harken back to my activisty days in Montreal and Seattle etc. I'm 4 weeks in to placement and have already written a Student Outreach and info guide, edited a booklet on greening child care centres, presented to other ECE students about the role of advocacy, taken on the organizations publications, and helped a bit with coordinating the province wide community forum tour that the OCBCC is conducting to get people revved up - it's a provincial election year, and we need to make sure that the government starts REALLY funding child care. It's just ridiculous, the state we're in. More on that maybe later - ELP, the new Early Learning Program that gets all 4-5 year olds in the province into kindergarten (sweet!) is gutting child care, as a lot of those kids used to be in child care centres, and without the support of their fees centres are freaking out. It's pretty nuts.

Back at school, I have a seminar once a week for that too. On Mondays. It's silly.

Work at the lab is also fun, but I'm not going to write about that now, because this is already long enough and no pictures. That's too bad.

Here's one of Conan, that I used in my post on our class blog about children, the internet, hacking and safety.

protect us, conan

So...that's what's been keeping me busy. It feels really great to put words up here again. Hope all is well with anyone who might read this - best to all those awesome friends I made oh so long ago when I was posting more regularly! Hooray for blogging!

Nerd out!