The summer's almost over...where was I?
Just kidding. I never left. I just took a vacation from Substack.
Thanks for reading A Social Work Generalist’s Notebook. I write about the experiences of one social worker, me. This Substack is free. It makes me feel less guilty when I don’t write here for a while. The semester is starting back up, so this social worker — who teaches and administrates programming in higher education - is back here, on his home laptop. Readers are free to contribute. That helps support the use of the hardware needed to write this.
On Fridays I try to focus on some kind of intersection of social work and the arts. This is a deliberately expansive theme, and often I can just write about something entirely different. Or, I can just not write at all.
This summer I chose that last option because, well, sometimes I need to do less. And this summer, a lot of stuff happened. We are working towards reaffirmation. I taught. I wrote stuff. I prepared and presented material to various groups. My beloved beagle died. I visited California.
I did do a lot of writing, but either that work went into .docx files, or by hand. I wrote a lot of stuff in pen-and-paper journals. My handwriting improved. It was calming.
Yes, Ridley died. We picked him up from his adoption home on September 1, 2019. I did not anticipate this would be the summer we’d have to say goodbye. At a later time, I’ll write about it more. Not today.
Other shocks occurred. Right at the start of the summer, I lost an important colleague. On the day I was volunteering to help with graduation, I got an email letting me know. I had just sent an email to her the day before, regarding a book chapter she’d invited me to write. Again, that’s not something I will write about here. I will note that I owe my promotion to her mentorship and support. That, I may be able to write about. Not today.
I was awarded a fellowship through the Provost’s office to create and teach a course about ethical AI use in social serve practice. That’s another thing I’ve been working on. On Wednesdays in this space, I’ll be writing more about that course design, AI in social service and the larger context of social work. Starting next week. Just not today. You can read the press release here, for now.
That’s the recap. I am sure I left out some things. I’ll remember more as I get back to writing here. See you Monday.