Education
Current Audio Book: Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen
I pondering today the nature of education and learning. I know many consider education to be a means to an end: to learn the skills and knowledge in order to get a better job, but the more and more I think about it, the more I realize thats not how I see things. I love learning for its own sake, the insatiable desire to learn more, see more, understand more.
I know I gets some weird looks for spending my days of reading the densest books I can get my hands on, without the motivator of having a class to learn for. Its not like I’m an intellectual snob, I just enjoy the challenge of plowing through them and understanding them.
It keeps me going when I’m a human machine at work.
It is saddening though, when I see people throwing away their chances at learning. I will admit to skipping the occasional class, but usually when I was actually sick or in too much pain to get to class. It doesn’t make sense to me though, to skip classes, especially if you are paying so much for them at the university level. Maybe someone can explain to me how skipping classes works out in the long run.
Right now I would kill to be able to go for classes, I miss the academic lifestyle so badly it hurts. I envy them so much. But soon enough I will be applying to grad school, and hopefully joining the ranks of academia once again.
Its just been a frustrating day, can you tell?
Take care, dear readers.
The English Literature Addict
Introduction
Current Book: The Hero of a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell.
Hello, my name is Suzanne, and I am a former photojournalism student.
Yes, the similarity to Alcoholic’s Anonymous is meant, though, if any of my old professors come across this, know that its not your fault. I just realized that I had lost the passion for photojournalism long ago.
But I wasn’t completely lost. Sitting in the airport looking up literary criticism to the book Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, for FUN, I realized something. I realized that one, this isn’t normal behavior, and two, that maybe there was something here I wouldn’t loose my passion for after a few years of intensive studies. I always loved the days when I came home from class and had to do a pile of reading for my English classes, while I dreaded going out and working on my photography assignments. Looking over my school report, I realized that my photojournalism GPA was bringing down that of my English minor.
Truth be told, I felt pretty stupid for not seeing it sooner, before I graduated.
So, now, I am in transition. Because of deadlines and when I made the decision, I will not be able to go back to school to gain my masters and eventually PhD until Fall 2009. And considering my job, not a bad one, but a mind numbing exercise that involves my hands but never my mind, it feels like a long way away.
This is the genesis for the title of the Blog. I’m a former student trying to continue the student lifestyle. Not the partying, but the part that most people couldn’t wait to be done with, the pursuit of knowledge. I’m an addict going to the local university library on my days off from a 6 day a week job to grab any book that might be interesting, trying to get my fix. And maybe this Blog is an attempt to have a forum for discussion.
Feel free to recommend books for me to read. If I come across something interesting in what I’m reading, I’ll write about it.
Have a good day,
The English Literature Addict
