I remember sitting around one day with my best friend, talking about our futures. She's your typical engineer: carries her graphing calculator in her purse, loves mass transit and sustainability, and is already firmly ensconced in the adult world. It's a wonder that we're such good friends, because we really are polar opposites. I pointed out that I likely would be jobless until I was thirty(ish), and she said "Really? I dunno, Tor. Thirty seems too young to be a believable college professor."
This, for obvious reasons, got me to thinking. What do you need to be believable?
In college, I always assumed that my professors knew everything. And that was BEFORE I realized that they were all PhDs. Seriously, I thought they were all MAs until my last semester, when my roommate pointed out that our school only hired PhDs. And fine, I didn't know anything about academia, but my point is that when I was an undergrad I thought an MA meant you knew practically everything. A PhD, I imagined, made you some kind of intellectual deity.
Now that I'm in an MA program, my impressions have changed a little bit.
Now, maybe it's just me, but whenever I accomplish something, part of me thinks, "See now, you got through it. That wasn't so bad." Which makes me think that most things are possible, you just have to decide to do them. It's like the Beatles said: "there's nothing you can do that can't be done." Good point there, John. I'll admit that when something loses the sheen of impossibility, it loses the "wow" factor a little bit. Example: when I get my MA next year (or if/when I get my PhD), I probably won't think of myself as being at the same level of intellectual awesomeness as my college professors. I can, however, hope that my students think of me as some sort of intellectual bad-ass. Which brings me back to the point I was making in my last post: if all your students think you're an intellectual god, but you realize that you're anything but...who's right?
It seems (to me at least) that the farther along you get in life, the more aware you become that you don't actually know anything. Now, a lot of people find this idea annoying and frustrating, and I was initially in this camp. But now I think it's kind of cool. It's nice that we can't know everything; it makes us human. It's good that we're never finished, because if you've got nothing left to do, you're not living hard enough. One of my favorite characters on one of my all-time favorite shows (Sam on the West Wing) explained it this way, when he was asked about the importance of going to Mars: "'Cause it's next. 'Cause we came out of the cave. And we looked over the hill, and we saw fire. And we crossed the ocean, and we pioneered the West, and we took to the sky. The history of man is hung on a timeline of exploration, and this is what's next."
See why I love this show? Anyway, as per usual, Sam is right. And I think that education is just a form of exploration. "What's next" is hugely important. It keeps us interesting.
So what does the mean for graduate programs? Surely anyone hoping to mold the minds of tomorrow should have some formal training. To be honest, I don't really know what that training should look like, or how I'd shape it if I had the opportunity. All I know is that I get sad to see unhappy colleagues. I wonder if we'll snap out of it and remember how we felt about books when we decided to come to graduate school. That feeling needs to be protected. Maybe it starts by creating rather than just criticizing those who do. I worry that criticism robs us of something crucial and humanizing. (Just look at the food critic from Ratatouille.) Sure, professors need to be book smart, but I think it's more important that a professor be whole-heartedly convinced that books can save people.
I'd rather be a believer than I smarty-pants.
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2 comments:
Your post reminds me that Humboldt never pointed to his own lack of knowledge--apparently he didn't find that worthy of criticism.
Still, on the verge of getting my own PhD (ok a long two years of verging),I agree with you. I don't think one gains any sense of infallibility, or even more knowledge per se, but rather, a long list of ways of knowing, or methods of finding out things. Maybe it is these methods of knowing that help point out all the stuff we don't or care to know.
Dr. Lecter: I don't think there is such a thing as sufficient knowledge -- ever. Unless you change the definition of sufficient to be something like "nowhere near enough but somewhere around enough to fake it." I say, all knowledge is co-constructed and totally subjective. No collectable amount of empirical data can tell you everything about a place you've never been and etc. A wise old man by the name of Anthony Bourdain once said, "The older I get, the more I travel, the less I know." I think this emphasizes my point -- can you ever learn anything more than "there is so much more to learn" ??? Quid pro quo Dr. Lecter -- how will we catch Buffalo Bill???
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