Reflective blogging or learning to sharpen your own axe

Almost exactly twenty years ago I took up a new position in my company and moved from Scotland to Germany. Unfortunately, the project I was working on was cancelled (the entire company went under shortly afterwards) so I became unemployed. Finding a new position in a small German town that suited my skills and experience was difficult, so I began doing everything I could to keep busy and earn some money: I gave English tuition, did freelance translations and for a while even delivered newspapers. After a year my right to employment benefits ended and I decided to become self-employed as an English trainer and translator. That went fine but being self-employed means you have no regular hours and a constant fear that if you turn a job down, you might never get an offer from that company or person again. I don't know if this is unique to translation companies too but somehow almost every job I got from them was last minute and very important! This does not make for a relaxed working environment. After about 18 months of doing that I got the chance to do a few hours of teaching Technical English at my local university, I jumped at the chance even though the pay wasn't great but I saw it as a chance to get my foot in the door. One year later the possibility of a temporary full-time contract came up at a university about 90 minutes away but despite the distance, I couldn't resist the opportunity to have fixed hours and a guaranteed salary so I went for it. It was a great experience but the commuting was a pain and after three semesters the chance for a full-time contract came up at my local university so I quit the job and came back home. Almost fifteen years later, I am still working in the same university and am primarily responsible for teaching Technical English, managing all the other foreign language teachers and am also the blended learning advocate for the other staff.

One common feature over this entire twenty year period is that I was always reacting, rather than being proactive. I jumped from job to job to support my family and rarely took time to think about what I was actually doing. I am reminded of the apocryphal tale of the lumberjack whose axe blade is getting duller and duller but doesn't take the time to stop and sharpen it. He ends up exhausted and with less chopped wood to show for his efforts compared to his colleague who took regular breaks to catch his breath, take a drink and sharpen his axe. The act of reflective blogging seems a lot like stopping to sharpen your axe. It is a chance to think about what you have done, why you have done it, what the results were and how you would do it differently in the future. In this blog, I will be using reflection to think about my practice in both Technical Communication and E-Learning and look forward to the new knowledge this process will reveal.

Photo: Eine Axt steckt in einem Holzpflock by Marco Verch under Creative Commons 2.0