Blue Collar Scholar

I've been meeting quite mysteriously with several professors lately. Not mysteriously as in like, at maskerade parties, discussing things with them in an alternate persona while fox trotting. Mysteriously, as in going to them during office hours and making scheduled appointments without really knowing why.


Why? What could they tell me? "It's okay"?" You'll make it"? "Just go for it. Be a professor"? Was this what I was looking for? Someone to give me a more serious garantee for my time investment? I don't know...

But, some of them do say that. Others say other things. But why? What could they possibly say that I haven't heard before?


Well, Dr. Johnson, for one, said a few things that were quite different and honest. He talked about how being a professor isn't something you do with a job in mind. It's something that you work towards because you love the research and time spent studying, in addition (and in some ways subjugated) to teaching. He said that, during his graduate school, he had to reduce his time spent studying to 80 hours a week. Reduce!

Johnson's point was well taken: Being a scholar is a huge commitment, an enormous amount of work, and not something enjoyably erudite. It's dirty 9am-5pm translation business. Working to become a professor is roll-up-your-sleeves, blue collar book work.

Dr. Watt, whose opinion usually fares on the "You can do it if you believe you can!" side of the argument, also made a pointed comment. She said that everybody can have a job, and most people do. You don't become an academian to have a job. You can do that by going into law or advertising or banking. You go into academics to learn and discover and struggle with esoteric topics. The job is means to an end (furthering your research through a funded institution), not the end, and you must go into a PhD or even Masters program knowing that if all you come out with is the degree and no job, you will still be satisfied that you did it.

So, what of it? I don't really know. In some ways, these conversations reinforced my already decisive stance that I cannot undertake the voyage of humanities/classics grad school right now--not when my passion for research and devotion to intellectual studies is not rock-solid. I am not sold on Socrates or attached to Achilles just yet. I could still be a wine merchant. (E&J Gallo sales jobs are looking oddly promising and I have a potentially helpful connection.) And honestly, what could be a more classically-inspired career than being a wine merchant?

Seriously though, before I determine what or if I want to devote a lifetime to intellectual studies, I need to have my own odysseys, first. Wine merchant or corporate businessman, history teacher in Sicilia or New Zealand sheep herder...the thought of settling on one thing right now feels extremely wrong for me. And that's one thing that I know for certain.

Saint Fransisco of the Nature Preserve

San Felasco State Park is pretty awesome. After going on a hike last Sunday with my bio teacher and a few other students, I realized that going out into a forest in the morning is a very fulfilling thing. Not that I didn't know it, but...I guess just hadn't remembered.


Not too many animals on such a chilly day, but a lot of ground and a lot of green.


There was only five of us: four students and my teacher- and it was really a perfect number. Our teacher, with little fauna to point out, aside from giant banana spiders and the occassional bird, spoke to us about the different kinds of plant habitats that are extant in Northern Florida. It was interesting to look at the forest and understand that the trees that existed here, the shrubs, the entire ecosystem was not random or haphazard, but was uniquely tailored to the local environment (although, I now somewhat embarassingly admit that I don't remember many of the exact species or conditions Dr. Hapeman spoke of. I'm sure that a concrete knowledge of nature is only acquired through hearing those sorts of things over and over again...)


The whole excursion, in some odd way that only I might parallel, reminded me of going through museums in Italy with Dr. Westin, my art history teacher. In both museums and in nature, it is possible to walk around and look right at something--a painting or a tree--and miss so much information encoded in it.


For example, knowing a painting is from the late fifteenth century Florence and not mid-sixteenth century Venice can convey quite a lot about the context of the work. Likewise, to understand why there are decidiuous trees in Florida as was as coniferous can help better recognize the type of biome we live in.


It is this sort of "knowledge makes things richer" approach that I think has all but evaporated from the school system's methodology. Not necessarily from the school system, because, obviously, I'm a product of that system and I've apparently gotten the message. However, the current methodology certainly doesn't encourage students to connect learning with an enhanced view of our world. Right now, even in IB, it was often "Here is this fact--know it." Now, IB did have a lot of moments which related history, language, and literature to each other and to their greater place in the world. Yet, to convey a message so it's carried out of the classroom into the world with the student...that's a whole other monumental step.

Anyhow, as for San Felasco, I would definitely like to go back soon, perhaps when more fauna appear in the Floridian flora. Also, Dr. Hapeman seems to have a growing fan club of students who want to accompany him on various trips to Florida state parks, and I think I'd like to keep tagging along. Knowing more about the environment, how things have evolved and formed together, makes the outdoors seem even more beautiful and important to preserve.

I sometimes see myself in a role to express that importance to those who are too far from state parks to see it for themselves, perhaps those in the government and in private business. But that's whole other story.