I thought I would take some time just now to bang out my daily 500 words (at least I wish I did it daily).

I just finished sending in two job applications, one to St. Paul’s School in NH and the other to Deerfield Academy here in MA. The one at St. Paul’s looks very interesting - a humanities teaching position. I think I would really thrive in a truly interdisciplinary humanities teaching position. I get intellectually restless, so an interdisciplinary approach really suits me. Don’t get me wrong, the history position at Deerfield would be really great as well. I just want to have some disciplinary flexibility in any teaching position I take.

Teaching at a private hight school would also leave me open to writing whatever I want rather than being tied to academic writing. I would love to get a tenure-track job, but I don’t look forward to the academic writing grind that goes along with it. Teaching at a private high school would allow me to continue to pursue the digital humanities idea more rigorously. If I was working in higher ed I would have to relegate coding to the back burner.

Speaking of coding, I have been moving along with it again today. I’m beginning to see through to a higher level of JavaScript coding thanks to the projects I have been working on through the Udemy.com website. I have a sense now that I could really set myself up for a career that dealt, in part, with web development. Let me break it down a bit.

  • So-Called Vanilla JavaScript: I keep working away at this and it keeps getting a bit more clear. Since this is the base of any sort of dynamic programming for the internet I need to keep my nose against the grindstone with this language. If I can’t code in this language I will be lost. No matter what I do, I need to make sure I get this down tight.

  • jQuery: jQuery is a bit simpler than JavaScript, but I can’t say I am quite there yet. This is another one of those languages I just need to keep at since it is clearly a very powerful and flexible JavaScript library. It’s also clearly not a substitute for regular JavaScript, but it seems to be extremely useful.

  • HTML5 & CSS3: I can’t afford to take these languages for granted, although I am much more comfortable with them than with JavaScript. I need to make sure I follow through with the PluralSight tutorials for these languages in order to internalize a lot more of their high-end capabilities. As with most things having to do with coding, there is a lot more depth to it than I currently am aware of.

I can’t really think of anything more to say on this subject. At some point I will need to put coding on the back burner and get back to my musical practice and writing. But for now, coding is an intellectual passion.