The Grapes Of Math

When you have a day job and you tell people that you’re also a blogger, it’s like being a waitress in LA telling people that you’re also an actress. We’re a dime a dozen, and only a select few are able to break into actually doing this as a career. This being said, I’ve often followed up my admission to online self-publishing by explaining to people that sometimes I just get a thought in my head that I need to write down. In my youth I was that girl with scores of journals stuffed with bad poetry, hastily scribbled yet meaningful doodles, and drunken ramblings about my place in the world. Well, I’ve grown up (at least that’s what I tell myself), and now I try to put those tenacious thoughts, those colorful marbles that bounce around my brain, to good use. This is one of those posts that doesn’t have much of a purpose. I’m really just writing to let the marbles out.

I think a lot about the educational leanings, or the lack thereof, of modern western society. Very heavy. When I originally starting forming this blog post in my head, I was going to talk about SCIENCE and how it’s become a politicized buzz word. I had a grand plan to rally my righteous fury about how our partisanship can affect our willingness to accept what is told us to us by people who we admit are smarter than us. I mean, this is very dear to my heart. I’m married to a scientist (whose work has green implications). We have a cat named Newton. I believe in man-made climate change and evolution. I trust the people who have devoted their lives to the discovery of new truths and new falsehoods, as the case may be. It’s an easy enough topic to talk about. It’s all over the news. Everywhere you look some non-scientist is giving their non-scientific opinion about science. The front runners of the recent Republican primary were famous for treasure troves of unfounded scientific claims (better known these days as the all-powerful gaffe). Even though that circus sideshow is over, the sentiment continues on. Like this little gem from Fred Thompson's Facebook page:

Read it in his voice. It’s much better that way.

Or how about Virginia legislators trying to block scientists from using the words “Sea Level Rise” in a report about, you guessed it, rising sea levels. Supposedly they are "left wing-terms" and "political speech" used to inflame the right. North Carolina is trying similar measures. Or there’s the unscrupulous move by BP to subpoena hundreds of confidential emails from the research group assigned to study the Deepwater Horizon disaster, presumably hoping to single out those inter-departmental communications that challenge the findings of fellow scientists in an effort to show a jury that no real consensus can be drawn. A jury who will likely not have the requisite wherewithal to appreciate that questioning findings is integral to the scientific process as a whole and contributes to the exhaustive confirmation of those findings.
   

These all went down in the last week or so. Like I said, I could go on about this, but I don’t think I will. 

Because I am not a scientist. However today I did run into my own academic dilemma. A problem at work over semantics. Word usage - something a little more up my alley. I found myself in the middle of an obfuscated cluster due solely to the  inability of my coworkers to recognize that a word has meanings outside of their understanding of that word. Not tomato/tomato. More like tomato/eggplant, but when I say eggplant, I really mean tomato. When people of different educational backgrounds come together in a work environment not tailor made to their respective disciplines, as is the case in my office, there are going to be some battles. However, those battles should come from hashing out the intricacies of the field itself, not in how (or if) we understand each other. 

There is a concerted abandonment of critical thinking these days - a gradual shift away from cultural pursuits towards studies that will simply land a job. There are smart people who go to school to learn about computers or business management, but they don’t read books and look at liberal arts courses as “useless.” Sure they can make a gif of a dancing kitten or set up a teleconference, but they can’t problem solve a new challenge unless someone points them in the right direction. A recent study showed that many employers in America, a country floundering in an unemployment crisis, have open positions they can’t fill due to what’s known as the “skill gap.” Of course, the problems are more complex than simple lack of smarts in the workforce, but its roots are there. 

My boss once told me that she prefers to hire English majors because, in her managerial experience, they’re more adaptable, more detail oriented, and typically figure things out on their own. They are able to take changes in procedure and workload in productive stride. And they can spell.

There’s a common misconception on why people choose to study literature in college. I was actually told once “Oh, you just like to read huh?” That’s far from the truth, and I still consider it one of those statements where either the person was trying to be callous or they just plain don't care enough to really think about it before opening their mouth. Yes, I do very much enjoy books, but reading (and more importantly comprehending and then discussing) can also be a nightmarish labor-intensive journey. Those who are fond of saying how easy it is to get an English degree? I’d like them to have to struggle to read several novels in a few short months from the American Naturalism/Realism period - a period known primarily for its abandonment of romantic sentimentality and strict adherence to the notion that the world is nothing more than a cold cruel cycle of despair the only escape from which is death.

One doesn’t always read books because they are fun, one reads them to understand how the authors choose to relate to and record the time in which they were written. To see how movements start and end and how people deal with them. You learn to critically examine words and intentions and how language moves and affects and destroys and nurtures. How it shapes the world and the people who make it. Studying literature is like getting a philosophy, history, sociology, and psychology degree all wrapped up in one leather bound first edition diploma.

English majors don’t go into that discipline in order to graduate and get a job writing books any more than Philosophy students do it to become great thinkers with great beards whose job it is to ponder metaphysics all day. They do it as means to greater goals. To become teachers, lawyers (yes law schools look favorably on English degrees), editors, or activists. To be better parents or better cubicle jockeys.  Or simply to be happy thinking rational self-aware humans. 

Still one of my most prized possessions

The same can be said for philosophy degrees. Or anthropology degrees. Religious studies. Poly-Sci. Liberal arts studies were once considered the cream of the crop. Yet now I find myself defending my BA in Literature and having to convince people that the degree I worked my tail off to get wasn't for naught. Our cultural paradigm shift only seems to reward monetary gain, and that esteem my chosen passion once held has been forever altered to a point which we should all mourn. Yes, telling your kids to “Go to college so that you get a job” is a great mantra, but it's an incomplete one. I think it would be better to say “Go to college so that you learn to think well enough that you can get all kinds of jobs and be good at every one of them.”

Neither Science nor Humanities studies are glamorous and most of the time won’t make you a millionaire. Yet they are vast undertakings of learning. And that’s the heart of it. You learn how to learn. Along the way you pick up facts, but the most important lesson you take from both studies is how to fine tune your brain, the thing you already had, into a highly effective juggernaut of self-powered acumen. I will gladly admit though that scientists have more to memorize.

Hug a scientist today, just for good measure. I know I will.

Pulitzer prize winner Chris Hedges said “We’ve bought into the idea that education is about training and 'success', defined monetarily, rather than learning to think critically and to challenge. We should not forget that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers." 

Despite all my bolstering about my own devoted grasp of language, I couldn’t have said it better myself.