Thursday, June 28, 2007

The Curriculum

For myself, I found that I was fitted for nothing so well as for the study of Truth; as having a mind nimble and versatile enough to catch the resemblances of things … and at the same time steady enough to fix and distinguish their subtler differences; as being gifted by nature with desire to seek, patience to doubt, fondness to meditate, slowness to assert, readiness to consider, carefulness to dispose and set in order; and as being a man that neither affects what is new nor admires what is old, and that hates every kind of imposture. Francis Bacon 1605.

Today I am beginning to add the links for you and it has occurred to me that the greatest travesty in the way a social work course curriculum is set up is that they wait until junior or senior year to introduce a student to philosophy. I was only required to take intro to philosophy. Once I took that one course I felt as though I should by all rights and consequences go back and retake all my social work courses taken until that date because now I had the skills to think critically. In taking other philosophy courses I learned to properly assess an argument which is one of the most important things in social work practice when dealing with co-workers and administrators in being able to present your side logically. It is quite possible that I could spend days, maybe even months listing all the philosophy-related links I found. I won't do that to you though...after all you might not be as interested in the course as I am. :-) I do hope you check out some of the links though. If you can just get past thinking that all the early philosophers must have been smoking something funny, back in the day, then I think you will find that you enjoy the course and will learn to be a better social worker for having taken it.


Tuesday, June 26, 2007

So You Want to be a Social Worker?

My aim for this blog is to help you do just that. I have decided to take the Summer of '07 off and just chill. The roadblock for me is College Algebra. My coursework is finished. My fieldwork is finished. All I have left to do is pass the licensure exam and College Algebra. The latter of which I may never do.

Coming out of the fetal position, throwing off the covers and coming in here to start this blog may turn out to be the very best thing I have ever done. Then again it may not, we shall see...

While doing my coursework I have managed to save nearly every link I searched for, dug through 15 pages of search engine crap help for and just plain stumbled on. My hope is to save social work students from having to go through that very same time-consuming agony. The plan in saving all these links was to share it with student colleagues at my own university. Then I changed computers and operating systems so now the floppy that was formatted for word doesn't work on the new computer. This blog is a better way to go. The links will be here permanently (once i figure out how to put them on here) and they can be shared with everyone! Yea!

The plan is to take a general social work curriculum, take the required courses and add the links that have helped me get through the course. Except for stats....i think i told you that you're on your own when it comes to numbers... :-) I will also add links to various other things that have helped me get this far with my sanity somewhat intact.