Friday, December 12, 2014
Friday, November 16, 2012
The Marrow of Modern Day Academia
“This as the system’s great flaw, and it enraged us. A pure meritocracy, we’d discovered, can only promote; it can’t legitimize. It can confer success but can’t grant knighthood. For that it needs class beyond itself: the high-born genealogical peerage that aptitude testing was created to overthrow” -Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever by Walter Kirn
1. What are current universities in the USA actually teaching?
a Is it just a ploy to delay people from entering the saturated work force or a test of patience/discipline for the fortunate?
2. What is the cost? (in currency AND mental health)
3. Where does it all lead? (Does having a degree or 2 mean that the holder is intelligent?)
4. Does it reinforce our class system like the opening quote suggests, as does the usage of the phrase ivory tower? (should all education be free?)
5. With the rise of technology and access to information are formal institutions necessary to be educated? Does it make the degree more/less valuable and/or put more pressure on the academic institutions to demonstrate a high performing citizen after graduation? (autodidact-a person who has learned a subject without the benefit of a teacher or formal education; a self-taught person.)
The older I get the more it seems like a Bachelor’s degree is no longer an option and is becoming a baseline requirement. Increasingly it seems as though having a Masters and even a Doctorate degree are becoming the baseline pre-requisites to compete, though the power of luck and social-networking shouldn’t be forgotten as they are major part of the equation.
Intrinsically Inescapable Inquiries Increase, Infinitely!
Am I just diluting myself and my craven passivity?
Am I actually DREADFUL of failure and/or pursuing the wrong degree, and that’s why I have yet to pursue Grad school?
Should I take on such an enormous task of trying to improve our educational system? Or am I too sensitive, cynical and filled with too many tough questions to ever survive in such a system? Should I choose a life of errant daring, a life in academia or something in between that I have yet to figure out?
..but AT LEAST alliteration avails as I prefer pondering, provocative probing & profuse passion to pretense of positivity or “consensual certitude” or awful, abiding, apathy anytime.
Thursday, May 17, 2012
My Chilean Teaching Experience at DUOC and Advice
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Quarter life rumination
Even as a self-proclaimed “child by choice,” 25 sounds old sometimes.
I know. I know it’s not. It’s relative.
But there is a small level of expectation that didn’t exist before.
I need to know I’m progressing even if age
doesn’t correlate to experience, knowledge, wisdom, or maturity.
That does NOT mean I want to start taking myself super seriously
or pretend I’m all grown-up even if 18 suddenly seems young.
I don’t want to stop living fervently or even foolishly.
I want to get manic about spring, dance with reckless abandon,
stay up all night talking to strangers without purpose,
impulsively drive to the middle of nowhere, dream of going around the world and
passionately compile stacks of books I’ll never get around to reading.
But I’m wary because I don’t have much time to waste.
Six years after the fact, I now understand why
my former boss said “you need more urgency.”
Never mind that she was talking about coffee. 30 will be here tomorrow.
Until now, I felt like there would be
“Time for you and time for me/
and time yet for a hundred indecisions/
and for a hundred visions and revisions.” (T.S. Eliot)
But now time has started accelerating. I barrel forward. Woosh.
As a child, my mid-twenties seemed very distant. With curiosity and naivety, I used to dream of being 25. I was always very confident in my visions. At 25 my older sister was married, working and a mother of three. Imagining a similar fate was not a stretch. I pictured myself in a black & white portrait. I imagined children around, organized belongings, day-to-day stability and a certain ease in my mannerisms. Sprinkled wisdom twinkled throughout. WOW I couldn’t have been more inaccurate and our lives couldn’t contrast more.
Now aside from aging, I’m certain that I haven’t a clue of what lies ahead, I am very confident of the uncertainty. Life is red, yellow, orange, blue, indigo, green and violet paint swirled together. It’s infinitely more complicated, messy and chaotic than I could have ever conjured up in my little black & white daydreams. I yearn for some routine to manage easier.
These days, I wake up each morning. I open my eyes and wonder how I survived my teens and arrived at this prime age. I wonder how I got to be where I am. Where did chance lead? And where exactly did the ripples from the butterfly effect begin?
I grazed a colossal ice-berg last year.
Traveling left me dreaming of possibilities, drooling over opportunities I didn’t know existed. I saw the potential for life and conversely understood the potential for its waste. There are so many places I want to go, people I want to meet on the road, and an infinite amount I have yet to learn. There is so much I don’t want to miss, and so the sound of the second hand ticking seems amplified! My fear of getting stuck in a rut is more terrifying than ever.
Transitions…. Everyone goes through them but that doesn’t make them easier. My resolve hasn’t hardened with age; I only grow more sensitive. Bracing myself, I get ready to leap yet again. Prepared to swim, wade, dance and float. I Inhale deeply to the mantra trust, and then I gingerly dive.
With awareness, gentleness, and kindness I have to trust everything will work.
stuck on this loveliness.
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Delicate dream filled twilight world: Transitioning back to life in the US
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Learning to Let Go
In less than a week, I will leave the noisy, humid, exhilarating city of Buenos Aires and return to Texas. I will have been gone for exactly 13 months. As I was preparing to leave for Chile, I wrote this “. As the departure date February 22nd 2011 transforms from a distant daydream into an imminent reality, now that my plans and a dream of mine come to fruition, I feel a smorgasbord of contrastive emotions to include the following but not exclude unlisted emotions: excitement, anxiety, mania, fear, gratefulness, elation, disbelief, unworthiness, joy, phantasmagorical and nervousness. The internal sloshing has concocted some bewildering cocktails.” (I just had to look up phantasmagorical haha, neat word though doesn't really make sense. Actually, I would rephrase the sentence entirely but that's neither here nor there.)
Now 13 months later, I’m going through a similar process again. Only this time, the place I am returning to is much more familiar. I know exactly what my house will smell like and that the air-conditioning will be humming day and night at 70 degrees. I know the feeling of cold tile that I will be walking on. In spite of all this, my life in the US has become like a distant dream. When I think about how life changing has been, I can only hope that it will not all fade to black.
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Buenos Aires, A Whole New World
When I arrived to the apartment (on zero sleep) after moving my life from Santiago to Buenos Aires, I started to rant about how excited I was to see clouds and feel wind, and the lady looked at me like I fell off my rocker. I didn’t know it was possible to miss wind. However, after living in a smog desert for a year, I can tell you it certainly is. I’ve only been here a few days, but I am already enamored with Buenos Aires, because this city is overflowing with personality. Perhaps it’s premature, but I already have started making a list of things that BA has that Santiago didn’t have: diversity of skin color/food, free education, cheap books nearly every few blocks, art and value placed on it, music, style that isn’t from the 80s, Spanish that is laced with an Italian accent and people who don’t whisper or cut off syllables as often.
That isn't to say that Santiago has nothing to offer or that BA is perfect. Buenos Aires' streets are much more dirty, the taxi drivers drive as if they were in bumper cars, there are ridiculous rates of inflation and everything is all around more chaotic.
We are living in San Telmo, one of the most touristy areas in BA. It’s a hipster’s paradise. Today we walked through a Sunday antiques market that was filled with hundreds of people from all over the world. I saw a woman dressed up as Frida Kahlo singing, a man dressed as Charlie Chaplin, people dancing tango, and a man playing classical guitar. They were selling an assortment of things that ranged from pocket watches, to crystal glasses, to siphons, to old advertisements, to books about communism, to Panama hats. The city is enormous and it seems to have everything. The amount of excitement and life makes me dizzy. It seems to have most of the things from home I was missing without all of the anxiety and stress that the US has. I couldn’t feel more lucky to be here..