As You Like It (More Education; No More Mewling and Puking)

I came home after my last evening shift of the work week; just too sore and restless to wind down enough to get to sleep. The soreness is undoubtedly due to overtraining, and I always seem to get weirdly restless after touring hospitals (work-related visit); I can’t explain why*. My first free evening of the week was yesterday, in which after all these years, I finally went to see a production by the Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan festival. The play was the comedy As You Like It, and the setting and characters’ costuming were adapted into a “steampunk” art design motif. It was one of Shakespeare’s plays that I never read through yet, so it was great to see a performance that I had no preconceptions about. The “All the world’s a stage. . .” speech was well delivered, and made me pause for thought about which part in life I’m playing now, along with remembering an earlier discussion in the week. I’m thinking more about returning to being the “whining school boy with his satchel”.

One of the more meaningful discussions I had at work before this week ended was with someone who had convocated from university recently, and we chatted about the challenges of the dilemma of buying into getting more future education versus trying to balance life in trying to make a living from what there is around now: we shared our thoughts and stories from her and my perspective, given our respective current living statuses and situations. As happy as I am to see more of a paradigm shift in the way that education is heading with the evolution of the resources available via the Internet, the critical element still remains to have self-initiative, and making learning cool and fun for yourself. What I'm most bitter about through all the years of classroom learning that I had was the emphasis on what to study (much of it now archaic and obsolete) and none on how to study (there was just rote-learning, no effort to teach mnemonic devices, lack of creativity in presenting abstract concepts by fusing them with concrete examples). 

I’m always open to educating myself, but for the most part the I’m constantly in an exploratory mode: I pick the most random of subjects to read about and study, and I haven’t yet sorted them all out to condense them down into a curriculum for a portable and meaningfully applicable skill set for anything radically different and from what I do now that would be more life enhancing. I still have a habit of actively trying to keep what I studied academically alive in mind. I have books about higher mathematics, statistics, and social/natural sciences, and critical essay compilations scattered throughout my place; I know don’t read them for entertainment. I’m not really proficient in many other languages besides English, but I still find myself trying to read, or intuitively translate, the odd web articles and news captions in French, Spanish, German, Ukrainian, and Russian** to keep my limited vocabulary and grammar of each of them from being entirely extinguished. I honestly don’t know why I’m compelled to do this. I learned some bits and phrases of these languages for some reason; I just lost, or have not yet found, any practical use for them. For the hell of it, I create spreadsheet projects for myself; some are practical, most are not, which later become easy victims to disuse and obsolescence. I do it mostly to not lose my basic knowledge in how to program, process, and organize data, even though my current job doesn’t really demand such talents. Money and time to sit in a class, or study with correspondence material, to get formal certification for valid credentials seems harder and harder to come by, and it gets more and more expensive each year I delay such making such a commitment.

Maybe what I really need now is something that can’t be taught in a class.*** Just meeting new people with such interests and intellect would be a good start.

*- Don’t bother trying to pry at me about it, client confidentiality comes first.

**- The only one of these that is meaningful (and yet have least knowledge of) to me is Ukrainian, and only because it’s the language of half of my ancestry. I figure that given the current global statistics, knowing these languages would allow me to communicate directly, or by means of a secondary protocol standard, with 52% of the world’s population. If I knew some Mandarin, Japanese, Portuguese, and Arabic, it would be more like being able to speak with 84% of the world.

***- Even if there were such classes for these alternate things, they would most likely be evening classes, which my work schedule would overlap.