I read in a non-linear, random fashion. One click on a link from the Twitterfeed leads to another article, which leads to another. I might start off reading about a Supreme Court decision and then end up reading a blog post that criticizes Kim Kardashian's mother for wearing a leather mini-skirt. I never quite know where I'll end up. This morning, I ended up in a brilliant place.
An article about Aaron Swartz memorial in New York (disappointed that I couldn't be there), lead to Maria Popova's Brain Pickings. She attended the memorial and summarized some of the best thoughts at the services. She noted that one of the speakers mentioned David Foster Wallace's Kenyon speech and highlighted DFW's message about the limits of intelligence. She linked to some of her older blog posts that echoed that sentiment.
A comment thread on this blog and a conversation with friends got me thinking this weekend about the limits of rational intelligence and its weak rewards.
Four years ago, I left the academia for various reasons. It took me nearly a year to recover. I left a place where one's value was based on the weight of one's brain and ability to withstand excruciating, boring conference presentations. I had to find value in myself that had nothing to do with my brains or endurance for boredom. I had to find people who appreciated me for things other than my the length of my CV. I was exposed to new people and new ideas. It was a good thing.
Leaving academia was very much like leaving a religious cult; I had to be un-brainwashed like a recovering Scientologist. I should have left academia years before. Academia is the Hall of Fame for rational thinkers. This is what happens to people who have mastered test taking skills and agenda pads of assignments. For some people, academia is a very happy place (though not for 70% of the instructors who don't receive health benefits, job security, or living wages) , but there are other nice places as well.
So much of the educational complex is geared towards rewarding people who have rational intelligence. But I'm not convinced that rational intelligence brings happiness. It is death to creativity. It doesn't prepare us for the non-rational aspects of life.
The system, and its lopsided rewards, alienates those who have other types of intelligence and talents, and creates life-long grudges and prejudices. It isolates the rational intelligence people from their peers and produces an echo-chamber of ideas.
Random learning, much like my random reading habits, brings you to new and better places. Life itself is so incredibly random that we need to learn that we can't control everything and to sit back and let things just happen.
Apt. 11d 
I got to 2:18 and stopped, right after the guy on the video said that in the past, you could be educated by Jesuits if you had the money.
Actually, at least in the early days of Jesuit education, one of the very unusual things about their schools (as opposed to other existing schools) was that they were free of charge. I believe that’s laid out in the Ratio Studiorum (1599). (I haven’t read it myself, but my husband once gave a talk on it.)
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Leaving academia was very much like leaving a religious cult; I had to be un-brainwashed like a recovering Scientologist. I should have left academia years before.
Academia lost a great resource when you chose a different path, Laura, but as you note, you’re not only very likely happier than you would have been if the brass ring had fallen into your hands, but you’re providing more people with insight and ideas and value than, in truth, I probably ever will through my classes and conference papers. So many kudos to you! I’m not sure I’m willing to entirely agree with your “random reading habits,” but your final sentence–“Life itself is so incredibly random that we need to learn that we can’t control everything and to sit back and let things just happen”–is a crucial truth, and one we can’t be reminded of too often.
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It astonishes me how different your academia is from my academia. Maybe it’s being in religious studies, where we spend a lot of time with the non-rational. Or maybe it’s being in the rural midwest at a state school, where most of my students who are the ones you talk about, with other types of talents, who go into elementary ed or law enforcement or construction management or accounting – but seem to flourish when they have a chance to think about history and talk about ideas. (I’m basing this not just on the conversations I have with them but what they say on the anonymous evals.) Or maybe poli sci people don’t have the kind of genuine love of their work – both what they study and what they teach – that I see in other fields.
Of course I’m not well-published and most of my work is like your random reading; I put hours and hours into poking around to find stuff on Mormonism to teach one class on Romney, or to put together a powerpoint of Islamic art. I could also give dozens of examples from colleagues here of how rational intelligence enlivens creativity rather than kills it. And any good teacher needs a lot more than brains.
Here’s the other thing – I don’t know one academic who doesn’t constantly deal with parts of life that require different kinds of intelligence, by raising children or taking care of their parents or being politically active, to as great a degree as people I have known in the non-profit world or the for-profit world (or anywhere else I’ve encountered people). The only difference is that we think maybe reading novels and history, or learning about economics and medicine, can help us do these things.
Anyway, I’m sorry that you foresee having a lifelong grudge against academia. It’s a loss!
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I’m actually having a crisis of conscience right now about something similar. Do I assign a “typical” paper on Death of a Salesman (formulate a thesis and argue it, using examples), or do I assign one of the “crazy” alternatives I’ve come up with (one involves images relating to “The American Dream” and having students relate the image to some aspect of the play; the other involves closely annotating a page of their choosing from the play–problem with the latter is that they’ll be anxious about format, and I won’t have a good answer for them, but the benefit is that it models the kinds of non-linear reading that is more common these days). The question I have is one of rigor–are the creative assignments equally as rigorous, and do the students need to know how to develop a literary thesis? And how many students am I going to have to fail for plagiarizing if I do the first type of assignment, because anyone with two brain cells to rub together can find a paper on any DoaS topic out there?
I have to make a decision by Wednesday, so place your votes now.
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Wendy,
How about offering a choice of assignment? That does mean playing to students’ strengths, rather than remediating their weaknesses, but it will be less boring for you.
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Is there any way, Wendy, that you could put a selection of text in something like a Google doc and have them ALL annotate it and be able to read each other’s annotations? The Chronicle of HIgher Ed had a really good article on ‘social reading’ a few weeks back, and it suggested various ways that reading could be a shared activity. I’d go with the ‘not a paper’ option myself.
Laura, I’m curious about when you left academia — the year. I know that I was completely turned off in my field, IR, at all the emphasis on positivism, measuring things, quantitative analysis and the fact that a bunch of old white guys just KNEW they were being objective — yet somehow all reached the same conclusions which excluded women, minorities, etc. However, things did start to change in the mid-1990’s with the linguistic turn, the aesthetic turn, the advent of critical theory, etc. I’d venture that there are a lot more ways to be a political scientist these days then there were perhaps fifteen years ago.
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IR was my field. Learning quantitative analysis is what has enabled me to support myself.
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Ack. My long comment got eaten. Let me break it up into two comments, so it doesn’t happen again. Yes, this even happens to me.
I left academia four years ago. I left because the profession was incompatible with raising a family with a special needs kids. There were other reasons, too. But none of them had to do with the intellectual direction of my profession. I had found a professional nitch.
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In the last thread, we were discussing anti-intellectualism. I said that it had roots in the fact that a majority of Americans were screwed over by the education system that rewards people with a very, narrow type of intelligence. Most people never get awards or attend honors ceremonies. And that’s not fair. Most people were humuliated for years in school and the scars are still there.
That’s why I never tell anyone that I have a PhD or that I write for a national magazine, which they never heard of.
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Colleges are made up of students who excelled at the school game. Academia is the Olympics of people who excelled at the school game. There are other types of intelligence, and they are not honored by the school system.
Leaving academia. YMMV, but it was extremely good for me to leave the academic culture and transition to a world where people’s worth is measured by a different ruler than brain size. There are people who have actually done interesting things. It’s really good to get away from the higher ed fish bowl and learn new things.
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“Most people never get awards or attend honors ceremonies.”
Yes, they do–for sports.
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No they don’t, Amy. And you missed the larger point of the video by getting distracted by minutia.
I have talked to countless friends and aquaintances about leaving academia. So many can’t believe that there is life outside the university. They end up sticking around for too long taking crappy jobs, just because they don’t have any self worth outside the academia. Let me just say to them again, there is a great life outside the university. You can do it. Run.
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Wendy – My strategy is to do either short free-form and/or crazy assignments and long traditional assignments, or vice versa. If you can find a way to make sure they have actually read the play – always a challenge! – by having them do reading responses or quizzes or whatever, then they can build on that in the longer assignment. And these are much more fun to read.
Alternatively, you can write a question where people who are drawn to safer, more traditional essays (and are perhaps intimidated by the instruction to “be creative!”) can do those, but the ones who want to start thinking beyond that can do it too. So maybe either a whole page of annotating or a half-page plus something creative.
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I haven’t been to that many sports awards ceremonies, but doesn’t everybody in the room wind up getting some piece of paper–most improved, best sportsmanship, teamwork, etc?
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no
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Not my experience for sports, especially past elementary school. Around here, and I bet Laura’s community is similar, there are people competing for sports scholarships. For many in my neighborhood, that’s the only way they’ll be able to afford college–or get in, in some cases.
Re: academia. I so agree. And although I’m teacher in a sort of academic feeder school, we are encouraged to imbue our students with all those other intelligences: collaboration and cooperation, creativity, etc. I am constantly striving to create assignments that do just that. I find that students struggle with a lot of them. They’re used to knowing how to check off the boxes to get the grade they want.
I, too, will live with scars from academia. I’m sure there are places that might work bettere, but I agree with Laura. In 2013, academia is still very family unfriendly.
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Oh, and the video is awesome. I kicked off an inservice day with it last year.
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Thanks, everyone. I have given the options sometimes, but I feel like the students who want a challenge just feel like it’s not worth it to even try. And it’s sometimes like grading apples and oranges. I have a creative project I do with The Bluest Eye, but I decided I needed a break from teaching it this term, so Miller it is (I’m also doing Hansberry). My final is actually a kind of intense essay-writing experience that doesn’t involve memorization (for which I was quite thankful when someone pulled the fire alarm mid-finals a few years ago).
We have Awards night at the middle school, and everyone *at* Awards night gets an award, but not all the kids in the school are invited. Neither kid has really done team sports, so I can’t comment on athletic awards. S’s dance company has awards that are choosy, but dance competitions give “awards” to everyone.
Last year when we went to Awards night, one kid was there whom I never expected to be there as I was aware he was not an academic achiever. It ended up he (and 3 others) got an award for reporting a chemical suicide he and his friends came across. I was so proud of him because I think he’s a great kid who doesn’t achieve academically and often gets in trouble behaviorally but deserved positive reinforcement for what he’d done.
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“I read in a non-linear, random fashion. ”
It’s funny because sometimes I teach this way, and I’m sure my students think I am not being serious/rigorous when I do this, but sometimes I just want to model the kind of thinking that relies on building connections among ideas. If I have students writing on gun control (sigh–to be honest, I’m kind of encouraging it), I want them to think past the simplistic arguments, so I take them on a tour of all the tangents that thinking about gun control can lead them to. At the end, have I made a point, proven a thesis, given them a nugget of info they can take with them? No. But maybe I have taught them to push their minds a little further than they usually do.
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I like the talk, and most educators I know would agree with it. I thought the study on divergent thinking – done, presumably, by one of us drones who went through a PhD program and works at a university! – was fascinating. I’ll have to see if I can still come up with 200 uses for a paperclip.
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Sorry, I am just feeling sorry for all the kids who don’t fit into the norm in schools.
I was also thinking about how I could answer the paper clip question. I’m thinking that it could make about 500 different types of weapons.
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Louisa, I like that idea, but with 70 students in 2 classes, I feel like it would be hard to do. I may try that when I teach a smaller class.
I’ve decided on two creative topics; they can choose either. In the end, I’m selfish. I know I’ll get maybe 5 good papers and 65 same-old same-old if I do the traditional paper assignment, and those odds just don’t work for me.
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Laura: Your bad experience with academia I think is really just a bad experience with American academia. Although it may equally apply in Europe and other places. In Africa, however, it is a lot different and a lot better. Not the least is that I have health coverage here, job security, and a living wage here due to a strong union. But, also the entire emphasis is different. There is a much greater emphasis on cooperation rather than the selfish ethos that dominates US universities.
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