Another twelve-week term is about to begin. This time around, I am taking “Assessment of Prior Learning” and “Software Tools”. The latter should be fairly simple for me – I had debated applying for waiver to bypass the course, as I already have a comfortable familiarity with computers, Windows, Microsoft Office, and the Internet. However, in light of the coursework I’m anticipating in my other class, and the fact that I could always stand to learn more about Office, I decided to take the class to provide a sense of balance for the winter term.
“Assessment of Prior Learning” is not a class, per se. I’ll be working one-on-one with a mentor in the weeks ahead to gather and assess all of my relevant knowledge and skills gained through my life and work experiences. By the end of the term, I’ll have developed a written portfolio summarizing and documenting this information, and will be submitting it for consideration for further college credits toward my degree in addition to the four credits awarded for the course.
I have no idea how much, if any, of my life experience will translate into college credit. I’m currently feeling as though I am sitting in the middle of stacks of unsorted snapshots of my life with the goal of determining which are worthy of preservation in a scrapbook, of organizing them by date, of categorizing them by subject, and of completing said scrapbook as a cohesive final project all within twelve weeks.
In other words, I’m to make order out of chaos.
For a spatial, abstract thinker like me, this is not always easy. It isn’t undoable, thankfully. I sometimes have to employ specific strategies in order to adopt a linear mindset, but it can be done. If nothing else, I’ll emerge on the other side of this course with four more credits toward my degree, a cohesive unified understanding of my working knowledge and skills, and an articulate narrative of who I am and where I’ve been in life to date.
Now if I could just learn to say in ten words what I tend to say in a hundred…
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