December, 2002:
remembrances of work past

I readily admit that the sort of work that I do is ... well, rather ephemeral. The learning process isn't the sort of thing that you can place on the scanner and preserve for posterity. Most of the time learning is the sort of thing that you realize happened only after the fact, sometimes even long after the fact.

That being the case, there really isn't that much of a chance that I'll capture even a fleeting learning particle on my flatbed scanner. The most I can hope for is to catch some afterglow, some passing remnant of the learning process.

If the truth be told, I doubt I can do even that. Papers submitted are no more than evidence of work done, not necessarily of something learned. And why scan a paper that's been printed from disk? So I don't even try to capture the learning process. Instead, I've preserved evidence of various milestones in my professional interaction with that process. Each tells a small part of a larger story. Each is a landmark, though not necessarily a significant one. Each accents a different aspect of the sort of work I do. Each offers a tiny glimpse into a whole that remains unmapped. And that will have to do.