It's All in the Approach

It's amazing how touchy humanities people can be when you criticize their subject. The defense of the humanities is a battle still alive and raging, and one that seems vitally (in the sense of life-threateningly) important to those involved. In my advanced literary theory class, the professor spent half of the first class period frantically justifying why a literary education was superior, even though no one had asked such a question. He claimed literary study was superior to a basic technical education (the socialization of people to follow orders in low level jobs), or even a measley "professional" education (teaching people when to apply technical logic--doctors and lawyers, this apparently means you). The professor's point was that a real leadership consists of a liberal education, one that teaches people how to think but not what to think about. He pointed to the importance of a "classical" or liberal education, implying that the English department would give us this.

At this point, I laugh. How many people in an advanced theory course can really claim a liberal education? Hello, a liberal education is supposed to include the sciences as well as the humanities. I'd be willing to risk a pretty penny that barely 2 people in that class regard Biology 100 as anything less than an annoyance--me as a chemistry minor being one of them--much less have a enough working understanding of science to be regarded as scientifically literate. A liberal education is about being a Renaissance man, about being broad not deep--the antithesis of the current mode of university education. They aren't receiving anything like a liberal education, just an education in a discipline, as Stanley Fish says in his recent New York Times article.

Not that this is a bad thing--as Stanley Fish says, it's delightful to those who study it. They shouldn't feel the need to justify its use to other people. And if they do, they shouldn't attempt to do so through the guise of gaining "critical thinking," as if the humanities has a monopoly on that. The humanities will not save us.

The key to this realization: The kinds of virtues claimed through the humanities--"those intellectual and moral habits that together from [sic] the basis for living the best life one can" (Kronman qtd in Fish)--are not part of the subject material, but the approach. One could just as easily become critically and creatively minded in studying chemistry or politics or music as literature. These are not only in literature. In fact, if that were the reason we were studying literature, we would all be studying philosophy instead. What subject we choose to approach this critical knowledge is more of a hobby, as I've stated before. What's essential is the test, not the subject matter.

Teach Your Children Well

Today, I was walking past the JFSB on my way home from campus and ended up behind a professor and his son, who was probably about 9 years old. The father was holding his son's hand and as they walked, they had the following conversation:

Professor (didactically): So they're called the bourgeoisie.
Son: Burr-jwa-zee?
Professor: Bourgeoisie. That's like us. And then there are the proletariat.
Son (mumbling to self): Proletariat.
Professor: Yes, proletariat. So Sam and John are part of the proletariat.
Son (swinging his dad's hand back and forth): Proletariat, proletariat, proletariat.

I have no idea who Sam and John are, but it took all my effort to keep from laughing. My first reaction was to wonder if Marx's Communist Manifesto makes a good bedtime story. Then I wondered why this professor was teaching Marxism to his son at age nine, when he's clearly not going to encounter it in school for a while. I was reminded also of Hugh Nibley who, according to his biography, taught his kids all sorts of crazy stuff at Family Home Evening. Apparently, they used to play games where you would recite a line from Shakespeare and the next person would have to give the line that followed.

Which made me think about what things I've learned from my parent's degrees. My parents are both overly educated types, though neither of them went into academia. My mom has two bachelor's, one in computer science, one in English, and a master's in English, and Dad has degrees in political science and business. (I can never remember which is undergrad and which is grad, though.) At first glance, I don't feel like I learned a lot from their degrees. It's not like we had political theory discussions at dinner.

But then again . . . .

Though Mom never explicitly taught us literary analysis as kids (no marking the scansion on poetry for FHE or anything), I'm pretty sure I've picked up a lot of how I think from her training in literature. Last winter, my parents came to watch me give a talk in my singles' ward. Afterwards, my mom pointed out how much I speak and teach exactly like her--that way she has of dealing with things in a literary way. And the more I think about it, the more it's absolutely true. I have her inflections and intonations, her penchant for looking up definitions and analyzing words, her way of looking at everyday things with new eyes, of searching for patterns. If I pay attention when I teach, it's like listening to her.

My dad is harder--obviously the business sense completely passed me by. I barely passed the IB Business test (which is supposed to be a piece of cake). But I think I developed my idealism from him. Dad has an aptitude for coming up with huge plans--for trips, for businesses, for life--which I see so much in myself. I like to build schemes for almost everything. Systems are my thing. He also trained into me a hunger for current events knowledge, a philosophical passion for rightness, and a loud mouth about it. We both love a good political debate, though my views are often moderated by my literary need to see from all sides (Mom again). I like to have my views heard, and for some reason I think confrontation is a normal mode of conversation. Some people fail to understand this--I'm not arguing, per say, I just want to know the truth.

I've always been on the nature side of the nature/nurture debate, but now I wonder if I should be so sure.

Encore! Encore!

What do you do with a B.A. in English?
What is my life going to be?
Four years of college and plenty of knowledge
Have earned me this useless degree.

I can't pay the bills yet
'Cause I have no skills yet.
The world is a big scary place.

But somehow I can't shake
The feeling I might make
A difference
To the human race.

-"What Do You Do with a BA in English?", Avenue Q

Only I Don't Even Want to be a Professor

Amateurs and War: A Nibleyesque Musing

Nibley’s “Day of the Amateur” really expressed well my own views on education. I find it strange that even at BYU there are people going through the motions of getting a university education only for the purpose of obtaining a piece of paper—a “passport” to a better job, as Nibley says. The problem is that the university has two functions: to enrich individuals with a liberal education and to provide the education needed for more advanced jobs. Both of these purposes are important, but they interfere with each other. In job-training mode, the university’s job is to teach content that’s applicable to what individuals will be doing in the work place, but in liberal-education mode, it ought to be teaching methods of thinking and general knowledge. Too much liberal education, and you hear students complaining that there’s no point to what they’re learning, since they’ll never use it again. Too much job training, and the material soon becomes dry and boring, like a checklist. Myself, I see the need for both types of education. As much as I enjoy theoretical concepts, it’s also important to pin things down to how you can actually use them, and vice versa.

I also liked the idea we discussed in class about maintaining amateur enthusiasm and mind-set while still obtaining professional credentials. Keeping up a good attitude can be hard when you begin to study anything seriously. Spend enough time with anything and you’ll start to get bored with it—you realize its flaws, the repetitive tasks you’re going to do over and over. Keeping our enthusiasm about what we do is a huge task, but if we can do it, it does so much for our lives.

Reading about Nibley’s war experiences has really brought into relief my own changing perceptions of war. It’s not that I ever thought war was a good thing, or even okay, but I think that there are fewer justifiable causes for war than I previously thought. What is a justifiable cause for attacking another nation? Clearly not greed or hatred, but what about injustice, cruelty, and wickedness? How far ought we to allow things to do before we feel justified in stepping in? Do we have to wait until their choices start adversely affecting us, or should we help out if innocent people are being destroyed? And aren’t innocent people always being affected? Yet we also have to make some allowances for agency—the wicked have to be allowed to prove they deserve destruction, and that can’t be done without injuring someone else. But how much is too much? When would God approve of us stepping in to stop suffering? I think some of the answer lies in why Nibley never talked about his experience visiting the concentration camp at Dachau. (I really wish he had spoken about it—I’d like to hear Nibley’s reaction to that total loss of human conscience. The brutality there seems to be the only hole in his statements for total pacifism.)

It must have been particularly hard for Nibley to serve in WWII after having spent his mission teaching the German people. But then again, it should be equally hard for any person to serve in a war against any other people. I watched The Last Samurai a few weeks ago with George. It’s a movie about a Japanese civil war between the forces of modernity and the traditional samurai. During one of the battle scenes, George remarked that the destruction was even sadder because it was Japanese killing Japanese. I sometimes wonder why we think this. Essentially, all war is equally tragic, people killing people. If we are truly trying to be like Christ, we should be seeing every person as he would, and fighting against any of them should be as painful as fighting against our own family.

Academic Crisis

Depressing realization today: I need only three more classes to finish the English major (besides what I'm taking this semester and Spring term): Shakespeare, Diverse Traditions, and the Senior Course. And after this semester, I would officially have enough classes to be done with the chemistry minor. And I'm done with all my GE. Which means I could spend all of next year just taking fun and interesting classes that I've never gotten around to, like astronomy, art history, more editing, more rhetoric, philosophy, computers in the humanities, and maybe even some poli-sci. I could get a second minor. Or even two. It would be pure bliss.

Except for I'm not a chemistry minor. I'm a chemistry major.

What in the world is my problem? Why do I feel compelled to do a double major even though the thought of trying to pack the six remaining courses into one year makes me want to cry? Because I really don't care about doing the work for my science classes. I enjoy the knowledge, but I don't care too much about the classes. At all. It's drudgery weighing me down.

The main thing that keeps me from considering dropping the double major is that I wouldn't know what to do without it. I've kind of build this identity around being a double major, and I'm afraid to let it go. How would I introduce myself to people if I didn't have a double major? What kind of psycho does a major for the sake of identity? Me, apparently.

Now that that's out in the open, I also have to say that I creepily enjoyed my O-chem test last night. Bizarre.

Learning and the Spirit: A Nibleyesque Musing

“Zeal without Knowledge” is without a doubt one of my favorite essays ever. The replacement of true knowledge with blind trust in the Spirit is one of my main concerns for the modern Church. Too many times I have heard people deride the importance of preparing for teaching in the Church because they want to let the Spirit guide the lesson. I think this is not only foolish and lazy, but strictly against the way God and the Spirit work. Undoubtedly, listening to the whisperings of the Holy Ghost is an important part of our belief. We know that man cannot know everything, and that God has many designs for us which we may not anticipate. Thus we must rely on the guidance of the Spirit to lead us in the right paths. However, this does not mean we should rely on the Spirit for things we could and should do ourselves. Just as the Lord says “it is not meet that I should command in all things” (D&C 58:26), it is not meet that we should wait for him to teach us all things. In gathering and synthesizing knowledge, the Lord commands us to actively seek learning, not just to let it passively wash over us.

And though we are to “seek learning . . . also by faith” (D&C 109:7), I believe it will do us little good unless we have the learning sought by study to go along with it. In the process of learning, the Spirit is more of a director than a worker—we must put ourselves fully into the work of gathering and making knowledge, and only then can the Spirit direct us to the insights he would give us. As someone once said, the Lord won't move a parked car. The Lord waits for us to knock, but the process of knocking is not, as Oliver Cowdery found out in D&C 9, merely asking for wisdom and waiting for God to tell us what to do. It is throwing ourselves into the work, constantly listening for the promptings of the Spirit, but at the same time being “anxiously engaged in a good cause, [doing] many things of [our] own free will” (D&C 58:27).

Back to the idea of preparing for Church talks, would not the Spirit be better able to enlighten our minds to new truths if we sat down and put an intensive amount of effort into studying out a doctrine we think we already understand? I think that much of inspiration is lost because we assume we have already sufficiently “treasured up in [our] minds continually the words of life” (D&C 84:85), when in fact it is a process we can never finish. There is an infinite amount of knowledge to be learned out there, and we should not be complacent with the small portion we have obtained. Nibley’s own scholarship is testament to this principle: though he was extremely widely read, he never felt as though he knew sufficient to simply coast along by the Spirit. He continued to seek out more books to read, new ideas and new ways to say them. And throughout all of his study, he maintains the inspiration of the Spirit in his ideas. Just because he was synthesizing his own ideas did not mean he had shut out the ideas of the Spirit, as seems to be the common misconception.

Nibley has some interesting perspectives on man’s relationship to nature in “Subduing the Earth.” I’ve often wondered exactly what was meant by the command to “subdue the earth and have dominion over it.” I like Nibley’s picture of man as a gracious lord or host over the earth, responsible for ensuring the comfort and improvement of everything in it. I’m still not certain how I feel about his idea that respect for life means we shouldn’t eat meat. Since we believe all things were created spiritually before they were created physically, it seems an arbitrary distinction to draw the line between using plants but not animals. If animals can be said to be equally valuable with man, why not plants with animals? And then again, why use rocks and minerals, which also have a spiritual creation of a sort? I’m not sure that valuing and respecting life means ignoring its usefulness. It’s an issue I have still to work out in my own thoughts, and Nibley has certainly caused me to think about it more.

New Perspectives: A Nibleyesque Musing

So, every Friday for my Hugh Nibley class, we're supposed to ramble for one page on what we thought of the readings. You know I'm all for stealing homework for blogposts, so you may see a few of these this semester. But hey, it's Hugh Nibley, so it's for your own good!

Some very interesting readings this week—“Treasures in the Heavens” was, of course, astounding. It was interesting to me to see how Nibley treats things I would normally think of as abstract philosophies as concrete facts. As an English major, I often wonder how important the abstract concepts we discuss in class are because they seem so detached from what constitutes the majority of our lives. But Nibley makes no apologies for the fact that his ideas are big and seemingly unconnected to the mundanities of day-to-day life. He’s not concerned with forcing you to realize why his theories are relevant to you—if you don’t understand the importance of them, then perhaps you aren’t ready to read Nibley.

The idea of heaven being more concrete and real than this life also matched up with what I’m reading in CS Lewis’ The Great Divorce. Heaven is not going to be less real than this life, but more. We are here to prepare to experience that level of reality and power that we could not have managed without a body. I guess the reason we think of heaven as so spiritual and insubstantial is because we have difficulty imagining anything more concrete than this reality.

I really liked Nibley’s “An Intellectual Autobiography” on a couple of different levels. First, it was just a great piece of creative non-fiction. As a writer, I admire Nibley’s style in this piece: he doesn’t allow us to get bogged down in the details of his life, giving us just enough to move us through his intellectual journey without confusion. He makes everything fresh and humorous. Second, I really enjoy the idea of giving an intellectual autobiography. Isn’t that the story we’d rather tell—the story of how we grew as a person—rather than the dates, facts, and figures that normally occupy so much of a biography?

Finally, one particular passage really struck me, the one where Nibley talks about working through the entire nine floors of the Berkeley stacks. The idea is so very appealing that I’ve begun to think about trying to do this myself with the BYU library. It’s definitely a crazy project, but it would be so rewarding. Think of how much you could learn about interests you didn’t know you had just by browsing through the stacks of an entire library! Not to mention the bragging rights . . . .

“Educating the Saints” was one of the Nibley articles that I had read before. However, I saw it in a new light this time. I just completed a paper on early Mormon ideas about rhetoric and education. The section where Nibley explains Brigham Young’s lack of eloquence was very relevant to the paper I was writing. The early saints really cared very little for ideas about formal education; they unabashedly shared the truth as they found it and sought more, not worrying about clever phraseology or the opinions of the intellectual elite.

I wonder if we could not use a lot more of that, even at BYU. Sometimes it feels like, even in the undergrad years, there’s such a push to get enough accomplishments to fill out a good resume (or, as Nibley says, stand at attention at the end of an obituary). When you ask people what they are learning at school, they inevitably list classes and activities rather than ideas, which strikes me as sad. The university is very display oriented, so much so that when I mentioned that I am “learning just to learn” to a classmate, he didn’t know what I meant and expressed an extreme distrust for any supposedly higher motive in education: “I’m in it to get the grade so I can get into grad school.” Learning seems to be lost on the learned.

Pandora's Stacks

"Others were busy in the lab, but who really cares what is in the stacks?" - Hugh Nibley

Okay, as if I don't have enough crazy projects to embark on this year, I just read pretty much the best thing ever in Hugh Nibley's An Intellectual Autobiography:

Berkeley was more of the same, with one difference--they had a library. I decided to put it all together in the stacks beginning at the southwest corner of the ninth level and working down to the northeast corner of the first level, book by book, stopping whenever something significant caught my eye. It took four years . . . .

I get chills just thinking about it: canvasing an entire library for fun. Is it possible? Well, BYU's library is a lot smaller than Berkeley's, it just might be. (Then again, Nibley did this in the 1930's. I wonder if there's a way to determine the size of the collections at that point. Hmm. I may have to fire off an email about that. But to who? Hmm.) And regardless of actual building size, five floors sounds much less intimidating than nine floors. I definitely don't have four years left here (then again maybe I do; you just never know).

I think I just might be crazy enough to try it. It just sounds so right: walking through the stacks, reading every title, pulling one out occasionally to peruse . . . . I'm resisting the urge to set up some complicated rules regarding how to go about making this managable--must read every title, can only check out one book per session, maximum of ten minutes for any book pulled off the shelves (stop! Stop!). As much as I like arbitrary rules, I think that would kind of ruin the purpose. On the other hand, arbitrary rules help us get things done.

Anyone else interested in the Nibley challenge? Think of it as NaNoWriMo for your inner reader. If we got enough of us together, maybe we could start a club.

Or a support group.

Flat Heresy against Intellectualism

There is not a sound here anymore
Except the neighbors singing opera next door;
And I am in the closet reading books.
You know, I never could quite find another soul I understood.
--Peter Breinholt, "My Little Town"

Recently, I've been disturbed by the idea that becoming educated is necessary to receiving exaltation. It's an idea that seems to thrive at BYU, since education and salvation are so constantly on our minds. In the Doctrine & Covenants we're instructed many times to seek learning, but is this a commandment that is necessary for salvation or is it simply a suggestion of how to build the kingdom? And what is the relative importance of socializing--being with people for no other purpose than to be with them--as compared to education?

Don't get me wrong, I love education. I'm much more comfortable with a book or a pen in my hand than with people. It takes me a while to recover from the overload of being in a large gathering. But more and more I wonder if my preference for books and learning is just that: a preference. Is there anything inherently important about reading the classics or learning science? (Oh, the heresy!) Are academics really in any substantial way higher than anyone else?

The problem with intellectualism is that we are encouraged to increasingly isolate ourselves from the outside world until, in the end, we begin to think that what we do is actually important. In a way, it seems to me that devoting our lives to academia is just as pointless and arbitrary as those who devote their lives to sports or fashion or television, only perhaps more insidious because our obsessive hobby has the illusion of eternal significance. But in actuality, all any of these groups are really doing is learning a set of conventions that apply to only one thing--the rules of a game, the trends of the day, the jargon of the elite, a set of novels to allude to. These sets of things to learn and master have no more real importance than a toy, something to bide the time as we are tested.

Is that all education is? A hobby? I'm beginning to lean towards yes. It's something we do because we enjoy it, but I doubt the inherent virtue some people read into it. Most of what we learn is convention, and the rest can be gained in such a multitude of ways that it seems silly to claim it as unique. It's only a matter of taste, it seems.

In Faith of an Observer, Hugh Nibley says something to the effect of the following: that the only significant things we can learn to do in this life are to repent and to forgive. None of us is particularly wise, particularly clever; we're all pretty much ignorant, but the two things we can do are to repent and to forgive. Intelligence, cleverness, and learning in this life are all an illusion. (Sorry, I can't find a transcript, so my memory will have to serve.)

So, if the rest is just a hobby, we should focus on how to repent and how to forgive. How to develop the first is obvious. We must develop our faith, our relationship with God, and our ability to realize our own nothingness. As Church members, we all know this. Nothing new here.

It is the second that interests me: developing the ability to forgive others. How would one go about it? And this is where we come back to the real purpose of socializing. All of these other hobbies we pursue--the humanities, sports, television--are simply ritualized ways of going about our real business: getting to know people. And not just know people as in, "Yes, I do know Bob in accounting," but know people as in understanding what makes them tick. Because, it seems to me, we must completely understand a person before we can possibly forgive them. Great examples of this in the omni-present Ender's Game. Charity comes primarily through comprehension of the person. (Perhaps this explains the unconditional love of parents. They understand their children almost completely.)

And even beyond the importance of general socialization, there seems to be special value in getting to know people who aren't like us--bridging social capital, if you will. I have learned so much this year by living with Kami, my elementary education major roommate. Our tastes in literature will never mix: she is bored by my sci-fi/fantasy, I gag over her romance novels; I want high philosophy, she wants believable life. It took me a long time, but I finally accepted this difference as a difference. It has nothing to due with her intelligence or exposure to the classics; it's 100% a matter of pure, inexplicable taste. She's part of the reason I'm questioning the importance of intellectualism. I know she can be a wonderful, fulfilled, interesting person without laying a hand on the stuff that I would choose to make myself so. Then what matters about a person must go beyond our interests, and we must seek out those of other interests in order to find out what that is.

Which is where the Peter Breinholt song comes in. Reading books is great, but at some point we must break out of our closet (no queer theory implications intended) and go find out why the guy next door likes opera, because nothing is sadder in this life than narrowing our interests so keenly that we end our lives never quite finding another soul we understood.

(Sorry this is really rough and confusing. Please, PLEASE ask for clarifications because I'm trying to figure out how to explain better what I am thinking.

As an addendum, I highly recommend the movie Faith of an Observer to anyone who hasn't seen it. You can even watch it online. Though I think the parts with the ruins are much better on the big screen.)

Homeschooling and Social Responsibility

Here's a comment I wrote on Ben's homeschooling post that got out of hand. So I'm stealing it for myself. :D

First, on the social ease aspect: I’m middling on this one. Most homeschoolers I know are fairly normal, not totally inept in any way. However, there’s always that aura of something different about them that you can somehow tell they weren’t raised in the public school system. I’m not certain how to pinpoint it yet, but when I meet homeschoolers I can usually tell before it comes up. I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing yet, but it certainly is different.

As for qualifications on teaching on different subjects, I have to agree with you that it would be one of the best parts of homeschooling to be able to learn along with your kids. However, I do worry that it could cause problems if your interests differ from your children’s too significantly. Could a practical accountant who refuses to read books (like my dad) really teach a child who loved literature? Of course, in this case, we have my English major mother to balance it out, but there still is a distinct possibility that your child will love subjects you think useless. What if the parents aren’t motivated to learn the subjects?

But my main qualm with homeschooling is that it seems so selfish. I mean, I realize trying to protect your children from worldly influences and bad teaching is a good thing. However, what happens to the children whose parents aren’t educated? Are they just stuck? It seems like reverting back to older times when your education was mainly based on what your parents knew/could afford to teach you.

A public school system is a huge achievement for society. If all the best and brightest and most motivated go to homeschool, where does that leave children born to those who don’t care? Without those bright children to interact with, is it back to the uneducated slums? Without morally grounded children, will schools turn into dens of violence?

I guess I see it as a social responsibility issue. I am part of society, therefore I must invest myself in it. As Church members, we are not supposed to be of the world, but we are supposed to be in it. If we all leave and go form our Zion without everyone else, we have failed in our purpose, though our own lives become perfect and ideal. As appealing as it might be to do homeschooling (and I admit it sounds like fun to me), I will seek out good schools for my children and do my best to help the local schools succeed. I will campaign for less homework, so that my kids have time to pursue other interests as well.

I just don’t see homeschooling as a viable option for any developed society, and I care too much about what happens to society to abandon it like that.

Canon: A Parlor Game for the Liberally Educated

The object of Canon is to be the least well-read person in the group. (If this seems backwards to you, see the Pride Variation.) The first player names a literary work that they have not read which they think most of the other players will have read. This player scores one point for each person who has read the book. Reading a significant portion of the work counts. (The definition of "significant portion" is left to the group.) Play continues clockwise with each player naming one book until everyone is too ashamed of their ignorance to continue. The one with the most points wins?

Challenges: If a player names a book which you do not consider "canon," you may challenge their book. When a challenge occurs, the player who named the book must justify why they believe the book to be canon. The challenger can then rebut the speech, stating why the book is not a classic. The remaining players vote on whether the book is a classic or not. If the book is declared canon, the challenger loses a turn. If the book is declared not canonical, the player who named the book loses their turn.

Special Situations:

• If everyone else in the room has read the book, the player receives double points on account of being shamelessly ignorant.
• If no one else has read the book either, all other players receive a point.
  
• If the classic named is originally written in a language other than English, a player scores an extra point for every player who has read the book in the original language, two points if the book was originally in Latin or ancient Greek.
• If the player who names the book was supposed to have read it for a class and didn't, they receive an extra point for being a slacker. An additional point is awarded if they wrote an essay on it anyway.
• If a player cannot think of a book, they may elicit suggestions from the other players, but may not pass.
  

Pride Variation: Invert the rules of the game to prove yourself the most educated person in the room. Score points for classics you have read that others have not. If you have read the book in the original language, get a bonus point. This version is not quite as enlightening, but still pretty fun.

This game has undergone extensive testing at the BYU Writing Center and proven to be a great deal of fun. It probably works best with a bunch of brilliant but insecure humanities students. Canon is a very cathartic game--there's much solace to be had in finding that the people you look up to are at least as ignorant as you are.

Knocking on the Door

I had an interesting idea for a short story in Relief Society today. It's a sort of allegory using passing a course as a metaphor for faith, works, and the atonement. I know, it sounds cliche, but at least I'm writing about what I know. :D

Anyway, it's turning out fairly well, but this story has had the annoying complication of forcing me to work through my evasion of going to see professors. Basically, I hate asking for help or dealing with people who know more than me. Observe this only slightly fictionalized chain of thought that goes through my head when I go to see a professor:

Later that day, she pulled out her syllabus and found the location of the instructor’s office. She circled it determinately with her ballpoint pen and set forth to the office building. As she walked down the stern hallway, important professors rushed back and forth on their academic errands. Bulletin boards hung on the walls, explaining the research projects of various professors, but the language was so complicated that she didn’t understand a word of it. Even the jokes and comic strips—posted on various professors’ doors to make them more inviting—only confused her.

And then, suddenly, there it was: the instructor’s door. She reached out her hand to knock, but then paused. She felt so out of place. There weren’t any other students here, only the professors. They all knew so much more than her that it seemed hopeless that she should even attempt to reach their level. Too much had happened before she had even been born—eons and eons of history, of experiment, of thought—so much material and not enough time to learn it all. How could they possibly expect her to sort through all the knowledge of humanity and, in addition, create something new? Compared to the problems of the centuries, the instructor would think all of her questions and worries so small and insignificant. He probably couldn’t remember what it was like not to know these things, and it would be a waste of his time to teach her. If she couldn’t understand these little things, she was just a lost cause, not worth the training that it would take to get her to a higher level. Who actually visited the instructor anyway? She was in college. She was supposed to be old enough to do things on her own. It was her responsibility. Knocking on the door would mean admitting she couldn’t do it, that she was a failure, that she was not prepared.

Just as she was about to turn away, the door swung backward beneath her hand. Standing in the doorway was the instructor, with a knowing, but friendly, smile on his face.

“I’ve been waiting for someone to come,” he said, motioning her inside. Embarrassed to be caught in her hesitation, she slumped into the seat in front of the instructor’s desk. He sat back in the swivel chair behind the desk, leaning back with his hands in his lap. “You know, I sit in my office so many hours a day, and yet so few of my students seem to find their way up here.”

“I didn’t want you to know I couldn’t do it on my own.”

“You weren’t meant to do it on your own.”

Now, I do usually get the jokes on the professors' doors, but the rest is pretty much true. Sometimes I think it would have been so much easier to have been born in an earlier century, when there was less to learn and more to discover. And I know the professors are really there to help us learn, but I simply can't get it drilled into my mind. Going to see a professor always seems like an admission of failure on my part. It's like a bluffing game in which I finally have to admit I don't have all the right cards. And I hate it. I guess it's mostly pride, since I build my identity on knowing things. :D

Anyone else follow this train of thought? Any suggestions on asking for help?

Insecurities of a Jack

There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.
- Oscar Wilde

Ever since I was five years old, I've known what I wanted to do with my life. No, not in terms of a career or practical goals--if you've been reading this blog, you may have noticed I still have no idea what I want in that area. I'm talking about a bigger, more general picture. I have one of those: when I started school, I decided my goal was to know everything.

In the ensuing years, I've been confronted many times with the fact that this goal is not precisely realistic. But that hasn't stopped me from trying. Evidence: majoring in Chemistry and English, watching PBS all the time, surfing Wikipedia, and reading *gasp* non-fiction in my spare time.

And in general, I like my way of doing things--gathering random bits of knowledge and stringing them together so they catch the light of truth in new ways. I'm personally not in favor of our current system of education, wherein we teach people more and more about less and less. In the end, society ends up with a bunch of people who excel in their one little area, but are so entrenched in their dogma that they have difficultly seeing the connections and applications to other areas. And since the rest of us are equally busy in our little cells of knowledge, we can't learn from anything the others find. It seems to me to be a very inefficient method of discovering knowledge. (Yes, I realize there's some necessity for specialization in order to get in deep enough to really push the envelope, but I think we take it too far.)

Gathering knowledge from all these different areas has allowed me to think and learn in so many different ways. However, there's a definite problem with being a jack of all trades, and master of none. And that is that I feel very insecure about my knowledge. I know just enough in almost any area (excepting perhaps music) to know exactly how ignorant I actually am. I feel fine holding a conversation with someone who isn't familiar with the subject, but if I'm forced into a conversation in someone else's area of expertise--almost everything is--then I'm junk. I'm good at thinking about all sorts of problems, but I lack the well of facts necessary to match wits with someone who knows the territory. Sometimes I can get around this problem by drawing analogies to other areas of knowledge that they aren't as familiar with, but sometimes not.

It's quite disconcerting because I know I'm a knowledgeable, intelligent person, and yet so many times, I find myself stuck on the listening end of a rant because I lack the specialization to combat it. So irritating, yet I still feel no desire to specialize. Somewhere inside I'm absolutely convinced that I just need more time to gather more facts, that I'll eventually find an end to my quest for knowledge of everything.

But it seems an awfully long way away.

Some Reasons Why I Love Being a Student

1. Free food. I have discovered, so long as I am moderately aware of campus events and freakishly early, I can get 3-4 free meals a week just from existing on campus.
2. Free candy. Ditto.
   
3. Pretending to be all scholarly. :D I was sitting on the floor in the hall of the BNSN this evening, doing some last minute cramming for my O-Chem test while eating a salad. There were a whole bunch of little kids in the building since it's National Chemistry Week. (Happy Mole Day!) As they walked by to go see the Chemistry magic show, they would all sort of stare at me like I was some kind of weirdo--Exhibit A: Hard Working College Student. Yeah, just you wait, children. Soon you will know the agony of midterms. Seriously, though, I am such a poser when it comes to studying. If I'm forced to accomplish something, it better look twice as hard as it actually is.
   
4. Signing up for classes. Which I did today. Specifically, this morning at 6 AM. I always wake up early to sign up for classes, even though I'm basically guaranteed to get whatever I want with my slew of IB credit (167 credits and two years left! Ha ha!). Anyway, winter semester is going to rock--O-Chem, Writing Creative Nonfiction, and SHAKESPEARE! Now I feel all trunky about this semester.
   
5. Signing up for a class in order to be required to read some of the stuff on your personal "to read" list. I just signed up for the Hugh Nibley class taught by the honors department. I guess it's as close as I'm going to get to the Mormon lit class, which the English department never seems to teach.
   

A Return to Normalcy

As normal as it gets at BYU anyway. Whew, I forgot how nice it is to be in school. Besides New Year's Eve and the end of the school year, there's nothing I like better than the first week of school. Don't you just love Provo in the fall? Boquets of newly sharpened pencils . . . .

Movie quotes aside, there's nothing that invigorates me like collecting syllabi and making new productivity goals. And this year I've tried to be a little more realistic about what I can accomplish. One of the pieces of advice for oldest children I found in my recent birth order research was that oldest children need to relax their expectations for themselves a little, to be happy with what they do accomplish instead of depressed at where they fall short. As I've been applying this method, I've noticed an opposite change from what I expected: I've become more productive instead of less. I think that lowering my expectations for myself has also lowered the activation energy (sorry about the chem analogy) it takes for me to start doing something. Since I don't need to spend as much time recovering between activities and worrying about not getting everything done, I can actually exceed my expectations and have a wonderful time. Why didn't someone tell me about this paradox earlier?

Along with the new school year came New Student Orientation, which I volunteered at last weekend. I suppose it counts as a service activity, and a pretty impressive one, clocking in at about 36 hours of time during the last few days you have to make money for school. But really, I do it purely for selfish reasons. First, I like schedules and bureaucracy, so I fit in very well with the routine of NSO. Second, where else can you get an instant group of friends and a social schedule given to you on a platter? NSO is my way of forcing me to have a social life. :D However, the most important reason is really that NSO gets me pumped up to go to BYU again. I've been listening to the NSO CD that I made, which includes a mix I made of Switchfoot's "Dare You to Move" and a bunch of quotes about BYU by President Hinckley, President Samuelson, and BYU radio. It's pretty much an amazing piece, for someone with no experience or musical ear.

That CD also has a really great talk by President Hinckley, "The BYU Experience," which I think every BYU student should listen to regularly, along with "Out of Your Experience Here." These two talks have shaped my philosophy of BYU which goes something like this:

1. Your first priority at BYU ought to be to be grateful, both for the tithing that is spent to subsidize your education (up to 70% of costs, according to my sources) and for the opportunity to study in a place that invites the Spirit.
2. In keeping with this gratitude, you should work hard in your classes, striving to really learn something rather than just to pass. Additionally, we should not learn anything without the Spirit with us.
3. Unlike most other universities, the mission of BYU goes beyond the "can-opener" approach; rather than just providing a gateway to a better job, BYU seeks to help us grow as individuals both spiritually and socially. As a result, our spiritual devotions and our social experiences should be equally important with our academic studies.

Alright, soapbox over. But you should really read those talks. Good good stuff. Oh, and did I mention that the calculus is coming back to me much faster than I thought? I went to my first review session for the pre-test for Math 302 today, and I just kept remembering everything that they talked about! Hurrah! That relieves a lot of anxiety about that class.

On Education and Knitting

Some notes from my English 363 reading, both of which are irrelevant to the class, so I thought I'd rant them here. For reference, here's the reading assignment:
The Dynamo and the Virgin - Henry Adams
Venus Transiens - Amy Lowell
Roman Fever - Edith Wharton
A Life Apart - Edith Wharton

"Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts." - Henry Adams

I thought that the Henry Adams piece was very interesting. His statements on education seemed very perceptive. So much of modern education focuses on accumulation of fact, partially because we generate so much knowledge every second that it is overwhelming. There are so many facts that we need to learn that there is no time to sit and talk about what they mean. I think particularly of high school. People are taught to regurgitate facts so they can get the right answer on a multiple choice test or spew them out into a list-of-facts "essay." It's an age of information bulimia, so to speak: we read and read, injesting masses of information, but once the final is over, we throw it all back up, taking little if any important nutrients from the facts to feed our starving minds.

Any digestion of the facts into comprehension, enlightenment, and understanding is left up to the student without the aid or encouragement of the educator. It seems we've decided that it isn't fair to grade students on intellegent thought, only completion of materials. We want to only test them on what the class has taught them. We fear testing students on their actual abilities. Witness the outrage of 4.0 students who score poorly on the SAT because they "can't take tests." What they mean is that they can't take tests that test their ability to think instead of their ability to repeat information. In my personal experience, SAT/ACT are a really good predictor, not of a person's success in school, but of their ability to come up with independent thought. (Most unfortunate that the two don't correlate.)

Whatever happened to demanding essays, research, thought? In high school, it was a rare class in which we wrote an essay which demanded any outside research or thought to write an "A" essay. Simply repeat what you were taught in class coherently with decent grammar and *poof* get a great score. I imagine outside of my honors-track world, it might be much worse. I think more essays need to be present in school. We need teachers who will teach children how to think or, more importantly, how to convey their thoughts to an audience when they write. Teachers seem to shy away from essays, mostly because students complain about them (a lot) or because of the grading workload. But hard work or unpleasantness do not mean that these things are not extremely important.

And now for something completely different and much shorter . . .

"'And you see—' Half guiltily she drew from her handsomely mounted black handbag a twist of crimson silk run through by two fine knitting needles. 'One never knows,' she murmured. 'The new system has certainly given us a good deal of time to kill;'" - Edith Wharton (Roman Fever)

Interesting how knitting is portrayed in fiction. I never noticed this before until 1) I became a knitter and 2) I started knitting in my English classes. Now whenever we come accross a passage about knitting, people stare at me until the teacher notices. Anyway, I think I might like to write a paper on knitting in modern literature sometime. I might have to broaden it out to all sewing arts, but still, there's some interesting stuff. In Heart of Darkness, Conrad's nod to the fates is through two old women knitting at the office in Belgium (? I can't remember), which to me tips knitting as a sinister and mysterious practice. There was one other text in my Brit Lit class about it, but now I can't remember. In this Edith Wharton story, knitting is a sort of "opiate of the masses," assuming that by the masses I mean the upper class. It's a sort of anesthetic to keep you from noticing how truly pointless your life is by giving you something harmless and seemingly productive. Interesting.

I could see how this might be true in my own life. I do tend to knit when I am stressed, nervous, or bored. I should really write this thing. Anyone else know of any knitting in literature that I could add to my list?

Ambition, Planning, and Willpower

So, it's finals week. In other words, my spring break, since BYU doesn't have one and I don't believe in "studying." I've been using this time mostly to catch up on some of the cool stuff out there on the net (read: surfing around wasting time). I did find a few nifty things, like librarything.com, on which I've already cataloged most of the books I own (should finish up on Monday). Thus the cool book thing on my sidebar. :D

Which leads me to the real point of this post. Not really, but anyway. . . . I've come to realize over the years that I am very good at planning things, but extremely poor at actually carrying them out. I spent about 2 hours last Sunday planning out a study schedule, which I had absolutely no intention of keeping. I mean, why should I? I took my Stats exam cold yesterday and got a 95%. Was the other 5% that I possibly could have gotten worth studying for a couple hours that I could have spent taking over Russia on Civ IV? Not really.

So that's not really a problem since I'm not losing anything by it, but in other cases my lack of willpower holds me back. For instance, for the last few years, I have been sketching out plans for a website/zine/wiki about the history of the Harry Potter fandom. Yes, I'm a nerd, I know, but the development of online communities really facinates me. I even went so far as to take a web design class last summer (not that it taught me anything I couldn't have figured out in a couple of hours--what a waste of $50). I brought up my idea on a Harry Potter discussion group and was actually approached by Melissa from TLC, who's only like the most powerful HP fan ever, about developing it as a subsite of the Floo Network. Unfortunately, I just sort of let the project slip. I could have been part of something really cool, that I'm actually interested in, but I just didn't do anything about it.

This is my problem: good ideas that I have no intention of following through with. Books I want to write (I've got three really interesting ideas floating around, one fiction and two non-fiction, but have done no research and written nothing), projects I want to accomplish (organizing my filing cabinet, actually figuring out some more web design stuff, like CCS and maybe PHP), things I want to get involved in (essay contests, volunteer efforts, volunteer in a chem lab, a social life, you know). And the problem is that I seem to be okay with having these things continue to float in my brain, and on paper even, but never materialize. Lots of ambition and planning, but no willpower to actually accomplish anything.

And I'm not really sure how to go about gaining willpower. I mean, the times when I actually feel like accomplishing something coincide with the times when I am too busy to do anything. When I have time, I just want to sit around and play computer games, watch movies and surf the net. Even catching up on my reading list feels like too much effort to put forth. Any ideas? I just want to feel like accomplishing something again.

Now off to conquer Russia.

Wikipediaholic

Yup. Yesterday I discovered the fun you can have reading random articles on Wikipedia. I spent about three hours reading instead of working on my sacrament meeting talk. Just some of the fun facts I found out:

-IB actually runs global high schools? And Ken Jennings graduated from IB? What's up with that?
-The game of Life, not just a board game with strange tiles anymore. Actually it's a really simple mathematical game That yields very surprising results. The object is to keep the pattern going as long as possible. If you're hungering for a logical challenge, check of this derivative clickmazes game. Much better than those simple Sodoku.
-The hyphen in the church's name is British? Interesting.
-Since when is NYU a private university?? I could have sworn it was public . . . .
-And the CEO of Dell is Mormon? Hmm.

Unpacking

Well, I'm finally back from Christmas vacation. Today was really crazy. Between dropping Heather off at USU, picking up Joni from the airport, and driving to Provo, I spent about 10 hours in the car, plus two in the airport. Sheesh. I hate waiting for things and riding in cars. I don't feel like I can get anything done because something might happen and I need to be on alert. (Plus in cars, I'll get sick if I try to do much of anything.)

So, I thought I had this semester all planned out until I got my grades for last semester. Then I realized that in order to keep my scholarship, I need to retake a few classes. Thus, this semester has suddenly become a lot easier than I thought it would be, but I feel sort of ashamed retaking classes. I mean, I should have done better in them in the first place. Almost without exception, my bad grades are due to my lack of participation. On tests and papers, I almost always do well, but quizzes and participation points are usually enough to bring my grades down to the B range. Not bad for some people, but in trying to keep a scholarship, huge problem.

I think the reason this happens is because I used to be able to get by in school on pure talent. No effort was really necessary to get A's (or E's, since my elementary school didn't use traditional letter grades). But in high school, they start including so many participation points and busy work, which I hate. For example, I failed (yes, with an F) two quarters of AP Biology. However, I got a 5 on the AP Bio test and a 7 on the IB Bio test. It was just ridiculous. Why should people who know everything in the class get poor grads because they refuse to do busy work?

Here's my solution to the problem. Give each student two grades at the end of the semester, one based only on important papers and tests, one including those plus all the busy work points. Either put both on the report card, or let students choose which one they want. I guess my main frustration is the lack of a standard grading system for all classes everywhere. If I were in charge, all classes across the US (maybe the world) would have a standard grading system. That way things can actually be compared. This is why I am a huge fan of testing systems. They provide a scale of comparison. All this nonsense about the tests not being fair just seems silly to me. People complain about them because they reveal the difference between a 4.0 student who learns and a 4.0 student who just does the work.

This detour brings me back to the real point. Through out my school career, I have avoided doing more work than necessary to learn the material. Basically, I'm a self-made slacker on purpose. But now I need to reform and get some actual study habits. Yeah, that would be good.