This post is from Thana, an Iraqi colleague who has shared in several training programs run by Simmons. She is currently in Chennai (formerly called Madras), India on a six-week training program. She writes:

From November 10-14 our lectures were about “soft skills.” I was so tired on the first day I didn?t go to class (lazy student) – that happened for the first time in my life that I am absent from a training class. At the time of break, my friend came to see if I was well and told me that I was missing this interesting lecture. So I changed my clothes directly and went to the class. The lecture was about motivation management.

In the evening, Dr. Rajendran lectured about stress management. What is the meaning of stress, and types of stress – psychological stress, social stress, and also the causes of stress. He then discussed how to deal with stress. Next, he gave us a stress symptom checklist to fill out to know if we are stressed or not. About me, no stress while I am enjoy my time here and learning more.

The next day our lecture was about “presentation skills,” done by Dr. Mahadaran, a human resources manager. Our evening lecture was about “presentation skills and behavior,” by Dr. Amuthalakshmi. She explained to us a Johnnie window and SWOT analysis. She gave us pictures and we must say a story about this picture and what we see. I loved this lesson and enjoyed it as did my colleagues – the way of her teaching and discussing is so attractive and we didn?t feel the time going by in the lecture.

At the end of lecture I wrote down a statement she said: “Observe around you and be thankful for all that you have in this transitory lifetime.”

The Next day Dr. Giridharan lectured us about team building and team work and how it is necessary for success in our work, especially in a library. Our evening lecture was about interpersonal relationships and transaction analysis. She was also so good a teacher. Thanks for all of them.

I appreciate Indian teachers because they are excellent. I learned more here about teaching skills but I found ladies better than males, because their English pronunciation is clearer.

Monday morning, November 17th, the lecture subject was “World class library for building global information society” by Dr. Harish Chandra.

We discussed the characteristics of information society, information power, information filtering, then how can we make our library not only for storing books but as a gateway to knowledge.

Our evening lecture was interesting too – it was about bibliographic data exchange formats, MARC, and the machine-readable catalog. Dr. V. Chandrakumar of the Library & Information Department of the University Madras presented the lecture. He discussed bibliographic data elements, bibliographic standards, international formats, data field structure, and various consortia – DELNET, MALIBNET, etc. The lecture was so good and full of information and the lecturer did his best to outline information for us.

The next day, Tuesday, the lecture was about HTML and hosting a web page on the Internet. It is so nice that we can create our page and then host it on net.

At evening there was no class because we must be ready next day early morning for traveling to Bangalore.

Greetings to everybody…. Thana