A Delayed Response

I meant to post my thoughts on this earlier, but classes have been keeping me busy. A professor I had e-mailed me the link to a post on Gardner Writes and asked me if what the poster was saying was how I felt. So after reading it over a few times I came up with this:

Although I don’t like to admit it I do view most of my classes and “academic pursuits” in this light. It feels like each class is in its own bubble and even though overlap does happen between classes it is really for the most part irrelevant. If in a class I am supposed to learn A, B, C then I will learn that because I am suppose to know it so I can pass the class and supposedly be knowledgeable about the topic. It is more likely that the case is the former with most people because unless it is a topic that is interesting it is deemed a mental waste of space so doing what is required is all that is necessary. What is the point of remembering something if there is no purpose or value in it? Believing this probably leaves the person with bits and pieces of information on the subject and a vague understanding, but it doesn’t go much further than that because there doesn’t appear to be any reason to go further. In short a lot of academic pursuits seem pointless and useless because there appears to be no reason behind learning any of it. This kind of thinking is probably what makes it harder to learn because there is no motivation or drive.

So I e-mailed it off to my professor and he suggested that I make a comment or better yet make a post about it. It had occurred to me before that I could do this, but being on the “other side of the fence” so to speak I was a little intimidated by the thought of commenting on a faculty members blog. I am usually the type to lurk and just read a blog to begin with, but now that I have come to the end of the post I feel much more comfortable with leaving a comment/blogging in response to a “superior”. Blogging and commenting is in many ways like having a real live conversation with somebody and just like in the real world once you start to converse it gets easier to open up and share.