Today is one of those days that I am truly savoring in my new life.  HGSE held an all-day event, “Critical Conversations & Bold Ideas,” keynoted by Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education, and Geoffrey Canada, Founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone.  As both are grads of the school, the talks were interspersed not only with interesting and inspiring and academic parts — but also familiar and funny and personal parts.

Classes were canceled so that we could all attend, and it was capped with a block party featuring a couple more Harvard grads:  Yo-Yo Ma (a world-famous classical cellist) and Janelle Bechdol (a former American Idol contestant who graduated with her Masters from HGSE last spring).

I do love the crazy, eclectic blend of things and people that come together here!

If you have time, Geoffrey Canada’s talk is definitely worth watching — they did live streaming, so hopefully they’ll post it afterward on the site.   As I’m sure many of you know, he’s incredibly articulate, passionate and high-impact.  And personable too, as seen in a pic with some of my gang from IEP!

Life has been a bit of a blur over the past month, and I realize I’ve been remiss in keeping up!  So I’m going to try to do it all in a bit of a burst here 🙂

I not only survived, but thoroughly enjoyed the 2-week intensive “IPSIE” prep session with my fellow students in the International Education Policy program.  Those are our smiling and relaxed faces on the final sunny Friday of the pre-session…

…and now we’ve made it through orientation, class shopping and 3 full weeks of class.  A few highlights:

Classes

Classes themselves haven’t changed much!  Lectures in auditoriums, sitting in rows, with section breakouts or working team sessions on occasion.  Definitely more high-tech and multimedia (no more projectors with plastic overheads — hahahaha!).  Lots of good interaction — and a fair bit of silliness when we’ve been sitting there for too long!

As promised based on a specific request (yes, I do take blog requests!), here is serious Erin, glasses and all, taking notes and paying studious attention.  8^)

Note-Taking

Now note-taking, on the other hand, has definitely evolved!  I was pretty conflicted at first as to whether to go with the flow of peer pressure and flip open my laptop, or stick with the pencil — hard for me to think properly without a pencil in my hand!  Then one of the guys showed me the Microsoft Word notebook format and I was all set.  Apparently, as long as I’m able to fool my brain into thinking it’s writing on lined paper, I’m good to go!  Darn good thing too since I can touch-type a heck of a lot faster than I can scribble, and I don’t have to look at the keyboard to do it.  Also — we are frequently flipping back and forth between online readings, presentations, websites and note-taking during the lecture itself.  A sample below of how many active windows I had going in one of my classes.  (And no, none of them was instant-messaging or the newspaper…. in  this picture anyway!)

Reading, Reading, Reading, Reading, Reading….

Not really much to say about this except that those are just the books for the four classes I’m taking.  Most of the readings are actually provided electronically for us to read online or print out.  Being a bit old-school, I am still printing most of them…. I’ve gone through 3 reams of paper so far and several ink cartridges.  I even blew out my old printer the second week of IPSIE and invested in a new, higher-speed version that can print double-sided.  I am assiduously recycling and will be making a large donation to a tree-planting charity at the end of the school year!

For reference, these are the books for:

• A801 Education Policy Analysis & Research in Comparative Perspective
• A412 The History of American Higher Education
• H236 Adolescent Development
• A019 Education Sector Nonprofits

Paper-Writing

I know that we all had serious doubts that I would ever be able to write prose again after 25+ years in business writing bullet points!  (I mean, seriously, I couldn’t even resist with the course list I just included above!!) Painful as it was, proof is in the pictures here that I have now done it 3 times 🙂  Those of you on the WPS team at TD Ameritrade will understand that I almost went into withdrawal as I refrained from all bullet points — forget my usual nested sub- sub- sub-bullets, I didn’t include any!!  I did, however, learn how to do citations and a bibliography all over again, in the officially-approved APA (American Psychological Association) format.  If it weren’t a website, my referral manual for the citations would be dog-eared already just from trying to make sure I had it right for these 3 short papers! :-p