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Time Traveler

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I guess it’s ’70’s week. For some strange reason, I keep going back there.
Brain tumor, perhaps?

In the mid 70’s I was in college, getting a Bachelor’s in Radio – TV. Yes, you could get a degree in that back then. We weren’t all at the disco, some of us were engaged in serious and weighty academic pursuits. What can I say? Radio – TV was my main area of interest.

Yesterday I made the terrible mistake of picking up one of my college textbooks from 1974. I didn’t take the time to read it back then, so why start now? It was a state-of-the-art Broadcasting 101 tome called “Radio and Television – Fourth Edition”, and here’s what it said in the “careers” section about securing the coveted job of announcer:

Announcing in radio is almost entirely a male occupation. Very few women staff announcers are employed, although there are a substantial number of women commentators who handle homemaking programs. Explanations ranging from “custom” to “overpatronizing style” of delivery are given for the scarcity of staff announcing positions for women in radio. The irregular hours of work and the necessity for operating technical equipment are other important reasons.

It is often possible for announcers to move into management, production, or sales positions, instead of into specialized performing work, following the beak-in period. Women in secretarial positions, traffic, or continuity, may be pressed in to service in small stations as occasional commercial announcers or demonstrators or may be asked to handle women’s or children’s programs. If they give evidence of proficiency in these assignments they may transfer to staff positions in larger stations. Women who work in non talent jobs in large stations and networks seldom have opportunities to move over into programming.

This depressing scenario is made more bleak by the knowledge that this was, in fact, the world as it existed for professional broadcasters in the early ’70’s, so our teachers weren’t lying to us, but what ridiculous stuff to have to tell people with a straight face. .

Clearly, my female classmates didn’t buy it – look how the world of broadcasting has changed. If you could be transported instantly from 1974 to 2011 the differences are so stark you might think you had landed on a different planet. We are all time travelers, I guess, it’s just that we’re traveling very slowly.

But when I look at this old textbook, I realize that this kind of thing makes up a large chunk of what I learned in school. Virtually all of it is out of date. No wonder my degree is worthless!

Is what you learned in school still true today?

81 thoughts on “Time Traveler”

  1. Rise and Shine Great Apes:

    I am trained as a social worker. I graduated with a BS in 1975 when the ratio of female to male Social Workers was about 10:1. The ratio 35 years later is about 10:1, or even less. It has not changed much. The related field of psychology is much more balanced, although I don’t know that ratio. Then it seems that of the few men in the field, most of them land in administrative jobs.

    Sigh.

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    1. I had an additional thought at the gym while treading the treadmill. I don’t think it is your degree or experience that is worthless, Dale. I think you have experienced agism towards both you and your listeners. I also think it is an error by your former employer. They need both younger and older listeners, not just the young ones they are courting. It’s not either/or. It is both/and.

      As a listener, I really resent it.

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  2. Funny, I was just talking to somebody about this last night.

    I started out as a pre-med, but somehow lost the will to go on in my junior year of college. If you think it is tough to get into med-school when you really, really want to, just try and do it when you are somewhat agnostic about the whole thing and figure it will interfere with you having a personal life.

    I then started the BSN program at Northwestern, but got bogged down by all the Theory of Nursing and We Are Just As Important As Doctors rhetoric amongst the faculty-besides, what I really wanted to be was a nurse-midwife, but in the mid-80’s there were very few opportunities, so that did not seem like a sensible choice either. At that point, I just kicked over the traces and joined the circus.

    Fast forward to the end of the last century and me having a baby-who did I spend most of my ob time with-the nurse-midwives.

    As the Pennsylvania Dutch have it, we are too soon old and too late smart.

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  3. My undergraduate degree is in (technical) theater and cultural anthropology. While the technology has changed some over time backstage, little else has – a flat still gets built pretty much the same way and casein paint still gets remarkably stinky if you don’t use it up quickly. And while cultures change, how we study them moves more slowly – you’re still around observing, asking questions, and generally trying to watch without getting in the way and then writing it up in a structured way. Useful skills for technical writing and web site work, as it turns out (a job that did not exist when I was taking “Magic, Religion and Witchcraft” back in the 80s).

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  4. the music and art are the same. notes and clay and paint don’t change much. the music software has turned wanna bes to singers with the flip of switch but it doesn’t matter much the up and coming will be gone and forgotten before the update on the software comes out. art is art but the commercial art scene is all computer generated now so the lines have blurred for those guys. business 101… my kids will have to take it from there. i went to the school of the streets and learned it there. today you need to know how to deal with voice mail no returned calls, emaail and the dead ends that never do open. we had that to but it was called mean secretaries back then.

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  5. My eleven years in graduate school coincided with the eleven years of the Vietnamese War, a war I opposed passionately. I mostly drifted from one vocational program to another, never with any practical direction until it occurred to me to become a journalist who would write columns scolding other Americans for their political stupidity.

    The first and last journalism class I took was Public Opinion and Propaganda. It was a shattering experience because what I learned is that people will believe what they damn well want to believe. All of us have devious mental mechanisms for protecting our pet values and convictions from rude contact with hostile facts.

    The first conclusion I drew from that perception was that the world needed more air pollution about as much as it needed another angry young man with a typewriter. I wasn’t going to win the hearts and minds of fellow Americans with all the predictable liberal cant I planned to write.

    The more discombobulating perception was that I had to be just as guilty as anyone else of choosing what to believe without consulting such inconvenient things as research, discipline and uncomfortable facts. My own structure of values and convictions was a Rube Goldberg machine held together with chewing gum, duct tape and spit.

    I came out of that class with no vocational plan but at least I was profoundly humble about my own values and beliefs. That is the single most important lesson I learned in eleven years. Nothing has changed.

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    1. i think if you checked with glen beck like palin di, he could give you a different take on it. maybe you could feel good about wallowing in your own opinions.

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      3. That is becoming modesty in you tim, but don’t be too quick to deny yourself credit. Based on admittedly short acquaintance, you are the most original man I’ve met. None of us is totally original, but you have assembled yourself like some incredibly diverse collage art piece.

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  6. Good morning to all,

    In the Department of Entomology in the school agriculture, where I did graduate work, students usually were more or less being trained to work for pesticide commpanies. Some might get work in government jobs, or in teaching and research. There were very few that went on to jobs in my specialty, describing and classifying animals, in my case round worms or nematodes. There is, in theory, a big need for my specialty, because many of these creatures remain undescribe and are an important component of the world in which with live, but this field of science has almost no funding.

    I’ve had a number of interesting jobs, but nothing you could really call a career, and now I’m retired. Mostly what I had to offer was my ability to adapt to many kinds of work and do a good job, or so I thought. My problem was convincing others that I could do this. If I could have followed my own best advice which was to work harder on promoting myself in a positive way to potential employers or potential customers for my service, I think a better record of employment might have been my lot. That’s my sad story.

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      1. Well, tim, I am still very much occuppied with lots of things, gardening, volunteer work, home improvement, family responsibilities, and other things. Being retired just means I have more time for doing some things that I didn’t have enough time to do before I retired.

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      2. i love that definition of retirement that says retirement is to wake up at 7 and be 4 hours behind 2 hours later. i think your seed saver mission is a great one. i am interested in getting involved in that. the gardening and family are great too. i love playing the game that if you had to make an extra 1000 dollars a month or you would have your fingers fall off … what would you do? the idea is that you can do it just figure out the details.

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  7. I didn’t have much formal education, and what I did learn didn’t stick all that well, but perhaps that’s not such a bad thing. My brain has a just-in-time inventory, acquiring knowledge when it’s needed for maximum freshness.

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    1. but the expiration date comes so quickly these days.
      hey i checked frye boots and we should talk if you want to turn them into money.

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      2. Not sure about other fields of study, but I found the sciences were particularly good about letting you know how much there was still to be known. Stuff that was cutting edge in the genetics lab they are now doing in classes for kids at the Science Museum.

        Be humble, be adaptable-both still good lessons-

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      3. MiG… I completely agree. My dad used to send me his Scientific American magazines after he was done and then when he passed away, my mother had the subscription transferred to me. I’ve kept it up over the years and have to say that each and every month it amazes me what I don’t know!

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      1. When I went to college I dismissed at least half of the courses because they were about boring topics. Now I might admit that there can be boring people and boring classes, but the world itself is utterly fascinating. If I fail to find something of great interest in geology or economics, that is another of my shortcomings and is no reflection on that area of knowledge.

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  9. The section of your textbook, Dale, reminds me of something I read 17 years ago. I was just beginning my research into adoption; I figured I should check out anything I could find and ended up with a couple of books written in the 50s. One of them actually said that single women weren’t good candidates for adoption – either they hadn’t had the experience of taking care of a husband or if they were divorced, clearly couldn’t handle the “taking care” part! In print. I should have made a copy and kept it. Glad I didn’t take THAT advice.

    My education is a winding path that hits on lots of areas and not very directly related to what I do. A BA in “Liberal Studies” (read this as “she just took whatever seemed interesting to her at the time”) is not too useful in the real world!

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    1. I find my liberal studies degree to be quite useful for things like crossword puzzles and cocktail party conversations. (Well, okay, and more mundane things like problem solving and researching skills…)

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  10. Unfortunately, yes. I got my BS in Music Ed. from the U of M in 1978. Armed with that degree from a prestigious and accredited institution, I soon learned that I was totally unprepared for the real world of teaching in a public school.

    My curriculum was heavy on academics (learning to teach beginning students how to play instruments, how to conduct the band, music theory, etc.) and teaching theory along with a token ‘Educational Psychology’ course, and the icing on the cake–one quarter of student teaching (preceded by a token quarter of ‘observing’ teachers in various schools and grades.)

    I knew nothing of budgets, school boards, dealing with inept principals and miserly superintendents, cooperating with fellow teachers, dealing with union membership, cutbacks, the stress of getting a 1% raise when inflation the preceding year was closer to 10%.

    I finally bailed after 6 years when the writing on the wall became crystal clear. My class load had doubled due to cuts in the music program, but I was getting paid the same salary.

    The only thing I see different today in teacher training by colleges is the trend toward having teacher-mentors for new teachers. I don’t think this is widespread yet, and I think it will help, but it’s a drop in the bucket as to what needs to change in order to revitalize our public education system.

    My solution: scrap public schools and go to all private, free market-based, no requirement for attendance, refund all taxes that currently support public schools and let parents choose to educate their children anyway they see fit. Once the parents again have a direct stake and say in the quality of education, and can vote with their pocketbooks, competition will weed out the dross and the best teachers and teaching methods will rise to the top.

    Don’t think that can happen? Look at what competition has done for the computer industry. In 1978, when I got my degree, personal computers were still a pipe dream. In the early 80s, the first computers reached the classroom and were little more than basic word processors and spreadsheets.

    Thirty years later, I can carry in my pocket a computer with the power of the most powerful supercomputers of the 60s and 70s, talk to anyone anywhere in the world at any time, and have virtually the entire accumulated knowledge of human history at my fingertips, all for a few hundred bucks.

    Think what kinds of strides we could make in educating our children if educators were motivated to constantly improve their product in order to receive our hard-earned dollars in a similar manner.

    Sorry to get off on a rant. My college education has always been a bit of a sore spot for me. Just glad it was relatively cheap compared to what college costs these days…or maybe there’s a connection. Hmm…

    Chris in Owatonna

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    1. Chris I agree and disagree. Let’s put aside your notions of what competition can do for education. We see that differently. But if you’ve been listening carefully, there is quite a movement afoot in education to teach the art of teaching . . . exactly all those things you were not taught and should have been. The mentors are just the leading edge of that. Research on education is putting a strong spotlight on the subtle arts of teaching and looking for ways to share them.

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    2. I think you may have something here, will have to think about that. Totally agree about being unprepared for the non-academic side of the teaching world.

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  11. Oh my I feel a need to defend my education. I am a scientist so most of the facts have been superceded and I am a counselor and people are still people. I remember in grad school being told that “You don’t need to memorize everything. You need to learn how to look it up and synthesize it.” Tools have changed but approach is the same. Now if I could just get a gig on one of those radio homemaker shows.

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  12. Morning–

    I read the question to Kelly this morning and she said ‘No, Pluto is no longer a planet’.
    Good Point.

    In my case I will say that I took some industrial tech classes in welding and machine shop… so while the machines and technology have changed the basic skills are still there. One of the interesting things we talk about in regard to curriculum is how much history do we need to teach the students? I believe having the pencil and T-Square knowledge makes you a better computer draftsman. But if that is so old to be foreign to the students, is it really helpful? Especially to the casual student that isn’t looking to this class for a career but simply to fulfill an English requirement.

    Think if you were trained as a blacksmith? Or Harness maker? Or typewriter repairman? What will be the comparable jobs in another 25 years?

    (Off topic, I’m lighting a production of ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ at the local Civic Theater. I really got my start in lighting at this same civic theater back in the early 1980’s and I lit a production of ‘Cuckoo’s Nest’ back in ’86, so it’s kinda fun to be back in this place with my old ghosts… While I have worked at this place on and off over the years I haven’t lit anything there since about 1993 so it’s kinda fun… )

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  13. OT, for those who might not have seen my comment late yesterday. If any of you decide to go the Cedar in Minneapolis on Sunday to hear Zack Kline and the Orange Mighty Trio at 7:30, I would make an effort to connect with you there. Zack is my son-in-law and he and OMT will be performing new music that was commissioned by the Cedar with a drummer added to the Trio. Tickets are only $5.

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  14. Methinks you are in the throes of a common malady these days — the “I-went-to-college-in-the-seventies-and-can’t-get-a-job-that-I-can-understand-the-title-of” syndrome. Combine that with the “its-January-in-Minnesota-and-I-don’t-have-the-money-for-a-plane-ticket-to-Mexico” Blues and you have a recipe for disaster.

    All I can say is-do not despair. Even though the above mentioned scenarios are survivable, most of us have also lived through much worse. Cross-country skiing in the gorgeous white landscape is especially comforting these days; one can be relatively secure in the notion that marauding terrorists, snipers, or suicide bombers are not going to be a problem. The list of things we Minnesotans from back in the day don’t have to worry about could go on for pages–being rousted out of bed in the middle of the night to escape invaders, having missiles fall through the roof, loading all belongings onto a raft so you can go vote, yadda yadda. You get the picture, Dale.

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  15. Hi all – it’s taken me quite awhile to catch up on recent posts. I do so wish that I could participate in BBC! I enjoyed the discussions about the 70s, whether or not religion is necessary for morality, the Jim Croce clip and the memory of Father Guido Sarducci.

    I think the fundamentals are still true. Things we’re taught in grade school, like courtesy, manners, listening and sharing are still true. We just all need to practice them more. Shine on, Dale! You have these skills down to an art form and we should all aspire to your level of talent! I do think that the way we work has changed enormously though, as well as the attitudes people have toward work.

    I took practical nursing in 1979-80. There was one male nursing student in our class. We had to be weighed every morning. We had to wear a clean, ironed student uniform: a blue dress with a white apron and white support hose, white shoes and a starched white student nursing cap. We had to have our hair tightly up. Not even one tendril of hair could be allowed to come loose. I think many of those standards have relaxed. Since then, some of the best nurses I have ever worked with were men. Nurses are still kept to a high standard of personal health and cleanliness, but you won’t lose points if every hair doesn’t stay under your cap (what cap?)

    Thanks for thinking of me BiR and MIG. Things have been unusually stressful at my DNR job. (I haven’t heard from Corrections on the nursing job yet, but that doesn’t surprise me. The longer they wait, though, the cooler the temperature of my feet…. I keep thinking of that young man in Tucson and what, oh what, if I had to take care of someone like him… talk about ethical dilemmas.) The DNR building I work in has asbestos. It’s in the floors, counter tops and ceiling panels. It’s a state-owned building and has housed a DNR warm water fish hatchery and hundreds of employees from 1954 until the present. We are now reduced to three Fisheries management employees, two Researchers, and myself due to budget cuts. We manage all of the lakes and streams in nine counties of south-central MN. (The ninth district! 😉 )

    All state-owned buildings that have asbestos have to be renovated. We’ve spent the last month moving out. We’ve had to go through 57 years of accumulated debris and decide whether or not it’s useful. Talk about change! I just saw half a century of work pass through my hands!

    So, the way it has worked out for me is that our office machines (for which I am responsible) are in a dusty room called the “net room.” My desk, work telephone and voice mail are downstairs in a men’s locker room next to the garage. My work computer and cell phone came home with me and I had to get it set up so that I can work within the DNR network from home. My “office” has been split into three places and I really felt the stress yesterday when I couldn’t forward the phones to the cell number and I couldn’t get into my voice mail.

    It’s quieter and calmer today. The boxing and moving is done, for now. I’m at home, working. I’m currently looking at two monitors – one for work and one for home and responding to both. We hope the asbestos abatement phase won’t take longer than a week. When the asbestos portion of the project is completed, I can take the computer back to work and enjoy my temporary office space in the men’s locker room. Hopefully we’ll be back into newly renovated office space by the end of February.

    I know that’s a long story and isn’t even very interesting. I just wanted you to know that I’ve been here in spirit and will be here as often as I can. Thanks for thinking of me. Enjoy your Carol Burnett party!

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    2. So glad to hear from you! Just keep making that “I work in a men’s locker room” thing sound as thrilling as possible!

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      2. So much for that old notion, “Would you like work or would you prefer a cushy state job! Since you have already been exposed to asbestos all those years I hope you don’t suffer a lot more now from men’s locker room stress. Maybe God was smiling on me that day I didn’t get the DNR job.

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    3. Krista… if you ever want to come up our way for something but don’t want the drive twice in one day… I have a new sofa that is very comfortable!

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      1. Thanks, Sherrilee! I’ll keep that in mind. I don’t go to the Cities very often anymore. I used to go to the West Bank area a lot but not so much anymore. Does anyone know what happened to Global Village?

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      2. I think there is a tea shop where the old Uptown Global Village used to be. My guess is that they were having trouble in that location… lots of stores in/around Uptown have closed in the last couple of years.

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      3. I have memory that I was through the West Bank awhile back and Global Village was selling everything off. That may have been when the 400 Bar was expanding some. I think they moved down to the old Savran’s Books location for awhile, but I don’t think that helped them much.

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  16. Owning my disagree to the dissing of liberal arts and public education.

    My liberal arts degree taught me to think outside the small town, communicate with a range of people from widely different cultures, some of whom have no language in common with me, problem solve like a son-of-a gun, and change careers on a dime.

    It’s also given me a stronger and deeper appreciation of the good things the world has to offer. I probably get more happiness out of an hour with a book than most people with a lot more cash get out of an hour of cable tv (which I choose not to afford).

    It seems highly undemocratic and elitist to restrict children to the education their parents can afford. It also seems to me, dangerous.

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    1. I remember asking some folks on a careers panel who all had various “business” degrees (accounting, marketing, business admin) how flexible their degrees were if they needed or wanted to change careers. With one exception, a person who had gone to a small liberal arts college and was a double-major, they all said they would have to retrain probably. I might grumble about how difficult it can be to quantify what I know and what I can do in a way that human resources folks can understand – but I wouldn’t trade either degree I have for much of anything. Love learning. Love thinking about things, large and small.

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    2. I agree. I couldn’t afford to continue at St. Olaf and ended a junior there. I will never stop wishing for that to be different. I don’t lack intelligence or talent but my education is incomplete. St. Olaf did succeed in many ways with me. Like you mentioned, MIG, I am adept at finding creative solutions to problems and I am able to communicate effectively with a wide range of people.

      I also agree with you about funding for education. It’s a slippery and dangerous slope to consider education (and health care? and elections?) as only for those who can afford them.

      BTW – I’m sure some of you must have known Reidar Dittmann. I just found out about his passing last week. I heard the tail-end of a story on All Things Considered on January 5. He was my art history prof, an exceptional man, and the only man who ever offered to carry my books for me (up the old flight of stairs to the old library – is that still the same?). He offered to help me if I decided on Art History as a major. Add that to the list of things I should’ve done!

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    3. I can’t speak for everyone else… but my comments that my education and my current work life don’t match up is not actually `dissing my education. I’m quite happy that I found a place (Metro State in the old days) where I could design my own degree and just take things that interested me. If I could afford it, I’d still be taking classes…. full time if I didn’t have to work (rats).

      I think it’s interesting the effort put into picking a school (I have a teenager about to start this process) based on “what you want to do”, when it is clear, at least for our small sampling here, that for many people, what you study may be irrelevant to the process of studying.

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  17. A degree is never worthless if it teaches you to think. My son has some fairly serious learning problems as a result of prematurity, including a real problem with math abd visua-spatial tasks, fine motor and graphomotor problems, and left sided weakness and hand tremor. He got through an undergraduate degree at Concordia with a C GPA, and then worked for a 18 months as a psychiatic tech at a psychiatric hospital and then as a job coach for developmentally disabled people. He managed to jump through all the hoops to get into a master’s program in Student Affairs and Counselling, with the ultimate goal of becoming a counsellor at a college or universy. He has a 4.0 GPA and can’t understand how this is so much easier than his undergraduate classes. He learned how to think as an undergraduate, and that, plus some maturity, made all the difference.

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    2. Yes, he certainly was! I was tired and frazzled and covered with dust but I listened to every word of his speech and came away with a vague, familiar old feeling…. hope???

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    3. to turn that into an inspirational and shiver up your spine moment is truely remarkable. the bible is 50% stories that teach us from positive lesson. 50% from negative lesson. we have obama and palin. isn’t she a pip?

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  19. I majored in astronomy for a couple years in college in the 70’s. Now, not only is Pluto no longer a planet (though I too continue to secretly think of it as such), Jupiter has a gazillion moons and planets are discovered on a regular basis outside of our solar system. My old textbooks might have the most value as historical context, in the I-can’t-believe-this-is-all-we-knew-back-then vein. BTW, one of the reasons I never got that degree (besides incomprehensible n-body gravitational calculations, etc.) was the realization that I would need a PhD and be willing to make half the salary of my male counterparts.

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      1. If you haven’t seen the episode of Nova based on Tyson’s The Pluto Files, you should. Very affirming in it’s way. Especially liked the parts about Clyde Tombaugh.

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      2. I have not seen the Nova episode, but I did actually read “The Pluto Files” by Tyson. It’s very well written and I completely understand the WHY of de-planeting Pluto, but in my heart I feel like they changed the rules after the race was run.

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      3. Well, there is also the school of thought that if Pluto does not meet the criterion for a planet, Earth is also somewhat suspect.

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  20. As some have mentioned already, my education taugh me how to find information if nothing else, and pointed me to some alternative ways of thinking about the world. But I think I had to leave home, leave the midwest for a while to absorb it all. And I eventually found ways to fill in the gaps in my Bachelor of Science degree (never did take any art). I am a life long learner through reading, and would gladly goclasses if I focused on one subject for long enough. 😐

    Krista – imagine how good your job (however long you are there) will feel when you actually have your office back… like when a person stops banging their head on a wall…

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  21. This week on the blog I feel as if I should apologize for teaching, or under the burden of proof for the week, is for having attempted to teach. Instead I offer as a balance point this long quote from the delightful and very rich book “The Elegance of Hedgehogs” by Muriel Barbery, translated from French by Alison Anderson:
    “I have read so many books . . .
    And yet like so many autodidacts, I am never quite sure what I have gained from them. There are the days when I feel I have been able to grasp all there is to know in one single gaze, as if invisible branches spring out of nowhere, weaving together all the disparate strands of my reading—and then suddenly the meaning escapes, the essence evaporates, and no matter of how often I reread the same lines, they seem to flee ever further with each subsequent reading, and I see myself as some mad old fool who thinks her stomach is full because she has been attentively reading the menu. Apparently this combination of ability and blindness is a symptom exclusive to the autodidact. Deprived of the steady guiding hand that any good education provides, the autodidact possesses nonetheless the gift of freedom and conscience of thought, where official discourse would put up barriers and prohibit adventure.”

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    1. Ahh…I have been meaning to read this book. The quote is a good one – makes me all the more interested to get reading.

      And you don’t need to apologize for having been a teacher – some of the greatest and most positive influences in my life were my teachers. Mr. Hendrickson, my elementary art teacher who taught me to love colors, Mrs. Harris my high school English teacher who guided enthusiasm for writing, Ms. Mashek who taught me that Beowulf was best read aloud and “the classics” weren’t boring at all…from Mrs. Hofflander my kindergarten teacher through my grad school professors – there were bunches of them who were good not only at teaching me the subject at hand but also that learning doesn’t stop and it should be fun. I bet you were one of those sorts of teachers, Clyde.

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    2. OK… first. Clyde, I don’t think you have anything to apologize for here. I truly think that most of the conversation has been that we (or most of us from what I can tell), value our educations… but not necessarily because those educations have translated into what we were led to expect. I don’t see this as a failure of teachers… I’m not even sure I see it as a failure. There are so many things that don’t turn out as we expect in life… if education DID, it would be such an anamoly (sp?).

      Second… I JUST finished “The Elegant Hedgehog” this afternoon. Truly, I am not making this up. Fabulous, fabulous. I did like this passage as I consider myself an autodidact. But one of my favorite passages was the insomnia passage in which she lists out all the thoughts and images that flit through her brain as she lays unsleeping.

      I highly recommend this book, and if you can, I highly recommend listening to it on CD. The HighBridge version has two different actresses narrating and it is quite nice.

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    3. Echoing what Anna said-I owe so much to my great teachers. Some were great scholars, others gave us good questions to chew on, but I think every one of them also said, at some time or another, “here, you should read this”.

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    4. clyde. great quote. i love this group. just happened to have finished this book this afternoon. we got diarriah of the autodidacts here on the trail. there is a difference between teaching by encouraging interaction and throwing out stuff that builds the gray matter to a better level of existance. the blog is better for your two cents. keep it up mr b. we need you.
      the ability of education to allow everyone to choose who they wish to become is magic. there is no greater gift than the ability to set your sites on a goal, figure out what it will take to get there and doing it. education is that link. if the old one did it for the old goal it served its purpose. new goal, refocus. ready set…

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