Growing up, I often struggled between loving to learn and hating to go to school.
I went to school and often enjoyed it simply because I loved to learn, but hated memorizing things that I thought were essentially useless, or at least not taught in a way that made them engaging and made their use apparent. I was always learning on my own, pursuing extracurricular interests, and reading voraciously--in fact, I spent most of fourth grade reading under my desk with my head on the table as if I had a terrible headache; I even thought I'd been clever enough to get away with it until the last day of school when Mrs. Takashima congratulated all of us on a "year well done, even those of us who spent the whole thing reading under their desks."
I was embarrassed to have been caught, but looking back I'm really glad that Mrs. Takashima recognized how valuable my love of reading was to my education, and that in the grand scheme of things, as long as I was doing the work and passing the tests (and I always did very well), and as long as I was not being disruptive, that it was alright for me to pursue learning on my own, even in her class. Man, what a great teacher.
The next year my family moved cities and school districts, and because of the different district requirements my parents seriously considered having me repeat fourth grade over again. Thank god they saw sense and didn't--thirteen years of public school was tedious enough without repeating one of them.
I often wished I could go to some other school... a private school or a boarding school where they only taught things I was interested in... or some fantasy school in my mind. Or, I wished I had a governess like so many of the characters I read about had in their books, to teach me languages and history and math in a way that was interactive and engaging, and at a pace that moved as quickly as I learned without having to wait for 35 other students to not only understand the material but to settle down and stop talking (the settling down often took much longer than the learning, after all).
What I'm getting to with all this is that I think I would like to homeschool my children. Obviously, we're talking a good many years from now, because I'm currently 20, unmarried, and unemployed, and you certainly cannot homeschool children you don't have. However, I really think I could offer my children a much fuller, more engaging, more interesting, and more well-rounded experience than the one public school was able to offer me. I managed to get a lot more out of public school than many students do, because I filled waiting time with reading and drawing and writing; I pursued the study of foreign languages independently; I was fortunate enough to have parents who were in a position to put me in piano lessons, voice lessons, girl scouts, drum lessons, art lessons, cotillion, band, choir, opera... you name it; and especially because my parents were very involved in my learning.
My dad is a chemistry professor at Caltech, and every year of elementary school (and even once in middle school), he would arrange to come in and do fun science demonstrations for the class: the whole class got to see a pickle become a lightbulb; they got to see seven beakers of rainbow liquid poured into each other all become clear and mixed again became the seven colors of the rainbow again; they got to see a marshmallow expand to twenty times its size in a vaccuum and then shrink down to the size of a raisin. They got to see all these things, but I got to go into the lab and learn how it all worked, and help engineer each experiment so it would work on the big day.
My mom is a doctor, and one of the most multi-talented people I've ever met. Any medical questions I had have always received (long-winded but) detailed explanatory answers. She grew up in Texas going to school with astronauts' children, and fascinated by space and space exploration, and when I was in kindergarten she helped my whole class build a moonscape and a papier mache Apollo 13, she sewed two kindergartener-sized astronaut suits and took pictures of my whole class. She loved to garden, and built an animal garden with my third-grade class (butterfly bush, kangaroo paw, zebra grass, snail vine, etc...). I remember riding in the car while she drove to a not-nearby museum to borrow their giant plastic model of a flower so that she could teach my class about plant sex organs. She taught me to sew and she taught me to cook, and I'm still learning from her all the time. I will never be as good as she is at decorating cakes.
Both my parents travel often--my dad would always tell me stories about his business travels, and my mom would plan our camping trips and other excursions for weeks. Even vacations I was not always excited about before (I didn't always know how good I had it) have become integral to the way I see the world around me.
I am absolutely certain that I have learned at least twice as much from my parents as I have from my teachers before college, and I still have much more to learn from them. Beyond that, I am fairly certain that, with the flexibility to work with the pace, interests, talents, strengths, and weaknesses of my own children, I could teach them much better than a public school system could. Mind, I don't say this out of disrespect for teachers: I strongly admire and believe in the public education system and have often considered becoming a teacher myself; my boyfriend is a substitute teacher, and I respect the work that is done in the public school system infinitely, but if a child's parents are passionate about their child's learning, and able to foster and support it, I don't believe that the public school system is able, by nature of its size, to offer the depth that a one-on-one (or at most a few-on-one), individually-tailored, home-based, exploratory education experience can offer.
That said, I don't understand how anyone can afford to own a home, let alone own a home with children in it on one income. I know there are people who do manage to do this, but as an about-to-be-college-senior hoping to move to Austin after I graduate, I can hardly even imagine renting an apartment on one income. I don't think I'll have to, but it's still a scary prospect. It's for this reason only that I regret my fancy create-your-own-not-science-major; I do believe that I am a more well-rounded and better-educated person for having studied the things I've studied, but they're not about to get me into medical school and I don't want to go to medical school anyway.
I decided to study English and Japanese and Art because those are the things that interested me, but I've recognized recently that if I'm ever going to be able to manage my own finances, let alone have my own finances to manage, I'm going to have to get good at it now, and I'm going to have to become employable now. There is no time to wait until I am unemployed--that's not something I can afford. So, I've spent the last few days updating my Linkedin and my resume, today I made (and handpainted) business cards (in Japanese and English), and I've been researching jobs for which I am or can become qualified and which hopefully would not bore me to death. Next semester I'm registered to continue my study of Japanese, and I'm taking a class on Entrepreneurship. I'm also finishing up the requirements for my degree program and starting work on my Honors thesis(!).
Because of my artsy, liberal, non-conformist side, I've always kind of shied away from "corporate" ideas like networking, business cards, linkedin, suits, natural hair colors, and desks... because I held the attitude that "If a company doesn't want to hire someone with blue hair, then I don't want to work for them," but the truth of the matter is it may not be that the company discriminates against alternative taste--if you are looking for a serious job with blue hair, it says that you are not willing to compromise to be a part of their company, which is something that you absolutely have to do. If I'm not willing to make a compromise on something as trivial as my hair, why should they pay me? They shouldn't. So, I'll also be phasing out the blue hair this year. I'm going to miss it, and someday I fully expect to be a member of the rainbow head club again--once I've proved myself in the workforce and have a good enough reputation that my hair will not precede me.
My current plan/goal/strategy is this: work for and learn from established companies/organizations/etc., to gain experience, real world workforce knowledge, connections, and funding for my own projects; in the meantime, write, do art, and develop my own business plan/s; and start my own business(es) and get them functional enough that I have flexible work hours and/or can work from home. At that point, perhaps I will be able to afford the time and money to have and homeschool children. Those last steps are a long way ahead, and I know it... but the years are going faster than ever, and I want to be able to give my children a childhood of experiences that is as good as or better than what I was blessed to grow up with, and if I can't do that, then I can't afford to have children.
P.S.~I'll be posting more soon about homeschooling thoughts and the future, because that's what I've been thinking about recently, and these thoughts I deem important enough to keep around for future reference, so there you go.
Showing posts with label About the Writer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label About the Writer. Show all posts
Saturday, June 15, 2013
Saturday, January 12, 2013
The Infinite Library
I should probably tell you why this blog is located at myinfinitelibrary.blogspot.com, why it is my infinite library, and what an infinite library is.
I don't have all the answers. That's what an infinite library is not.
In fact, my infinite library is very different from other infinite libraries. It's a concept that was introduced to me by a professor from Germany who taught a course called Modernism and Beyond in European and World Literature to me when I studied abroad at Universiteit Maastricht in the Spring semester of 2012.
I liked this professor because he knew we would not like everything we read in his class, and he did not ask us to like it or even try to like it--he only asked us to try to appreciate it and learn from it, and to try to understand why we did or did not like each book we read. What all did we read? Gosh... Demian, Nadja, To the Lighthouse, Heart of Darkness, "The Wasteland," "Waiting for Godot," Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man... perhaps something else. That sounds comprehensive to me. Perhaps I'll talk about those books later. Demian in particular changed the way I look at the world, and it was fantastic. I regret that the books were provided by the school and I did not get to keep my notes.
In any case, the professor presented in passing an idea he called the infinite library, and which I have probably revised since hearing it. This idea is the biggest thing I garnered from this class, and has changed my world view more than anything we read or anything else we talked about. I vaguely remember him crediting this idea to T.S. Eliot, but have found nothing to support that. There is apparently an infinite library concept introduced by Terry Pratchett, but it is rather different insofar as I can tell. The infinite library as I think of it is this:
When you are born, your infinite library is essentially empty. It is an infinite room full of infinite shelves full of no books at all. From that point on, every single thing you hear, taste, smell, read, touch, or experience becomes a book in your infinite library--but each book is not free-standing. Oh, no! Each book is affected by every single other book already in your infinite library, and as your infinite library grows, everything you experience thus become deeper and more multi-layered and more meaningful, more connected. In the physical world, a poem is the same every time someone reads it. The words stay the same in spelling, meaning, order, and juxtaposition; the punctuation is constant; the number of lines is unchanged; and so on. But the infinite library is another matter! In the infinite library, every time you read the same poem, an entirely new book is added to your infinite library, because it was an entirely different experience for you. Even if nothing else has changed, the second time you read it you already know how it is going to end--and more than likely, other things have changed. You may have undergone more and more varied struggles, you may have fallen in love, you may have read another book--and so this new experience of reading it is separate from the first and any other previous times you may have read it.
This can be applied to anything, not just literature--when I rode carousels as a child it was for the novelty alone; now it is for the novelty as well as for the nostalgia, and when I do I think of the carousel I rode in Paris and how it was next to a beignet stand and it was a foggy day; how all the horses on the Disneyland carousel are white so children don't fight over them; how Griffith Park refuses to accept help to refurbish their carousel; how I used to be a member of the Santa Monica carousel when I was very little, and once met Sean Penn and his kid there; what my own carousel would be like if I had one--you can have your very own for just over five hundred thousand dollars! (I know, I know... I can't afford that either)... and so on.
Anyhow, that is that. I don't know how much I'll talk about the infinite library on this blog, but I talk about it a lot in real life, so there you have it.
Happy New Year!
I don't have all the answers. That's what an infinite library is not.
In fact, my infinite library is very different from other infinite libraries. It's a concept that was introduced to me by a professor from Germany who taught a course called Modernism and Beyond in European and World Literature to me when I studied abroad at Universiteit Maastricht in the Spring semester of 2012.
I liked this professor because he knew we would not like everything we read in his class, and he did not ask us to like it or even try to like it--he only asked us to try to appreciate it and learn from it, and to try to understand why we did or did not like each book we read. What all did we read? Gosh... Demian, Nadja, To the Lighthouse, Heart of Darkness, "The Wasteland," "Waiting for Godot," Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man... perhaps something else. That sounds comprehensive to me. Perhaps I'll talk about those books later. Demian in particular changed the way I look at the world, and it was fantastic. I regret that the books were provided by the school and I did not get to keep my notes.
In any case, the professor presented in passing an idea he called the infinite library, and which I have probably revised since hearing it. This idea is the biggest thing I garnered from this class, and has changed my world view more than anything we read or anything else we talked about. I vaguely remember him crediting this idea to T.S. Eliot, but have found nothing to support that. There is apparently an infinite library concept introduced by Terry Pratchett, but it is rather different insofar as I can tell. The infinite library as I think of it is this:
When you are born, your infinite library is essentially empty. It is an infinite room full of infinite shelves full of no books at all. From that point on, every single thing you hear, taste, smell, read, touch, or experience becomes a book in your infinite library--but each book is not free-standing. Oh, no! Each book is affected by every single other book already in your infinite library, and as your infinite library grows, everything you experience thus become deeper and more multi-layered and more meaningful, more connected. In the physical world, a poem is the same every time someone reads it. The words stay the same in spelling, meaning, order, and juxtaposition; the punctuation is constant; the number of lines is unchanged; and so on. But the infinite library is another matter! In the infinite library, every time you read the same poem, an entirely new book is added to your infinite library, because it was an entirely different experience for you. Even if nothing else has changed, the second time you read it you already know how it is going to end--and more than likely, other things have changed. You may have undergone more and more varied struggles, you may have fallen in love, you may have read another book--and so this new experience of reading it is separate from the first and any other previous times you may have read it.
This can be applied to anything, not just literature--when I rode carousels as a child it was for the novelty alone; now it is for the novelty as well as for the nostalgia, and when I do I think of the carousel I rode in Paris and how it was next to a beignet stand and it was a foggy day; how all the horses on the Disneyland carousel are white so children don't fight over them; how Griffith Park refuses to accept help to refurbish their carousel; how I used to be a member of the Santa Monica carousel when I was very little, and once met Sean Penn and his kid there; what my own carousel would be like if I had one--you can have your very own for just over five hundred thousand dollars! (I know, I know... I can't afford that either)... and so on.
Anyhow, that is that. I don't know how much I'll talk about the infinite library on this blog, but I talk about it a lot in real life, so there you have it.
Happy New Year!
Friday, September 28, 2012
Before I Begin,
Allow me to introduce myself and this blog.
My name is Erica, and I am an eternal student, and a student of the world. I am also a college student, but that is somewhat irrelevant to the definition. What I mean by "eternal student" is that I intend never to stop learning. I will hopefully graduate college in a little over a year and a half, but that will by no means be the end of my education, whether or not I go on to graduate school or culinary school or what-have-you. My degree will be little more than my excuse to go out and learn more on my own, my own way. Every failure and every success has the chance to be a learning opportunity if you let it teach you. This is also what I mean by "student of the world." I am not merely a student of books, or classes, or teachers, or Wikipedia (although I am a student of all of these as well). I am a student of experiences, travels, sights, sounds, conversations, people, creations, and everything on either end and in between.
I once went to my father at the end of a day, complaining that the day had been wasted, it was useless, and I wished it hadn't happened. In response, he asked me what I had learned that day, just to name something, any one thing. When I did, he quipped, "See? Your day wasn't wasted. You learned something." Before I could even begin to argue, he added, "If you can learn one thing every day for the rest of your life, you'll be doing pretty well. You'll be doing better than a lot of other people, anyway."
You could say I've taken that conversation up as my standard. After that, I set my phone's greeting message (you know, what it says when you turn it on?) to ask me what I'd learned that day. My dad might ask me what I'd learned when we spoke in the evening or afternoon, and I would always come up with something. On the rare occasion that I couldn't come up with anything, I'd go off and endeavor to learn something. This is the way I live my life, and I wholly believe that I am a better and more well-rounded person because of it.
One of my favorite quotes is one you will probably recognize as something Thomas Edison once said: "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." It's disputed whether he ever actually said it or not, a point which is completely irrelevant to the universal truth of the quote. Anything can be a learning experience if you approach it that way.
Now, a confession: I plan to continue writing this blog, and certainly have plenty of things planned out to say on it besides the reason for which I created it specifically, but I have admittedly created it as a class requirement.
I am in the BIC program in the Honors College of Baylor University. This program requires a class called "Biblical Heritage," BIC3358.02. I am taking the course with Drs. Novokovic and Whitlark. This course requires that I read a book centered on some aspect of ethics and religion. It must either be written from a Christian perspective, or I must read it through a Christian lens. I will be required to respond to it in at least 8 sections over the course of 8 weeks or more.
I have chosen to read "Is There a God?" by Richard Swinburne. From what I can tell before having really read it, Swinburne is a theist but not a Christian. I believe in full disclosure, so I will say that I personally am a pagan, mostly Wiccan with some Asatru influences, and far more spiritual than religious.
The book is laid out in 7 chapters and an Epilogue, so it has already been very neatly split up for me. I plan to respond to each chapter in three parts:
My name is Erica, and I am an eternal student, and a student of the world. I am also a college student, but that is somewhat irrelevant to the definition. What I mean by "eternal student" is that I intend never to stop learning. I will hopefully graduate college in a little over a year and a half, but that will by no means be the end of my education, whether or not I go on to graduate school or culinary school or what-have-you. My degree will be little more than my excuse to go out and learn more on my own, my own way. Every failure and every success has the chance to be a learning opportunity if you let it teach you. This is also what I mean by "student of the world." I am not merely a student of books, or classes, or teachers, or Wikipedia (although I am a student of all of these as well). I am a student of experiences, travels, sights, sounds, conversations, people, creations, and everything on either end and in between.
I once went to my father at the end of a day, complaining that the day had been wasted, it was useless, and I wished it hadn't happened. In response, he asked me what I had learned that day, just to name something, any one thing. When I did, he quipped, "See? Your day wasn't wasted. You learned something." Before I could even begin to argue, he added, "If you can learn one thing every day for the rest of your life, you'll be doing pretty well. You'll be doing better than a lot of other people, anyway."
You could say I've taken that conversation up as my standard. After that, I set my phone's greeting message (you know, what it says when you turn it on?) to ask me what I'd learned that day. My dad might ask me what I'd learned when we spoke in the evening or afternoon, and I would always come up with something. On the rare occasion that I couldn't come up with anything, I'd go off and endeavor to learn something. This is the way I live my life, and I wholly believe that I am a better and more well-rounded person because of it.
One of my favorite quotes is one you will probably recognize as something Thomas Edison once said: "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." It's disputed whether he ever actually said it or not, a point which is completely irrelevant to the universal truth of the quote. Anything can be a learning experience if you approach it that way.
Now, a confession: I plan to continue writing this blog, and certainly have plenty of things planned out to say on it besides the reason for which I created it specifically, but I have admittedly created it as a class requirement.
I am in the BIC program in the Honors College of Baylor University. This program requires a class called "Biblical Heritage," BIC3358.02. I am taking the course with Drs. Novokovic and Whitlark. This course requires that I read a book centered on some aspect of ethics and religion. It must either be written from a Christian perspective, or I must read it through a Christian lens. I will be required to respond to it in at least 8 sections over the course of 8 weeks or more.
I have chosen to read "Is There a God?" by Richard Swinburne. From what I can tell before having really read it, Swinburne is a theist but not a Christian. I believe in full disclosure, so I will say that I personally am a pagan, mostly Wiccan with some Asatru influences, and far more spiritual than religious.
The book is laid out in 7 chapters and an Epilogue, so it has already been very neatly split up for me. I plan to respond to each chapter in three parts:
- a summary, in which I will briefly recap what Swinburne has said in the chapter and attempt to make sense of it;
- a response through a Christian lens, or my best attempt at it (I really will give it my most honest attempt, although I have no clue how I'm going to go about this);
- and a response from my personal point of view, which may or may not have anything to do with my own religion/spirituality, but I'm not making any promises.
If this sounds like a plan to you, then I'm glad we're in agreement. If not, feel free not to stick around for the ride. I'll be here either way, because I'm graded on it. Afterwards, I'll probably still be here either way, because I am the kind of person who has things to say.
Wishing you all the best,
Erica
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