One of the things I am up to these days is studying. I’m thinking about going back to school full time. I’m also considering a more current-era alternative to traditional college, which would be to pick a couple of projects and use those as springboards to get up to speed on the skills most relevant to my desired job. The thing is, I’m not sure my desired job is a job. At least not one that already exists out there and if it does, that job would likely require that I have a college degree to prove that I can do it. Seems more like I’m leaning pretty hard in that college direction, and though I feel a little uneasy writing it, I suppose that does seem about right. Though maybe not exactly the traditional route. And if that sounds like I’m hedging my bets, well… yeah, I am.
Most of the best results I have had in my own personal growth have come out of a combination of traditional education (or similar) and pursuing something like autodidact projects of need. I was really shooting for a succinct description and I don’t think I got there.
Autodidact is a term that entered my lexicon a few years back. It came to me the same way I first learned the term “luthier”. Luthier came to me when I was a few guitars into learning how to make electric guitars. These little projects of mine came up in a group conversation and a friend of a friend remarked, “Oh, so you’re a luthier…” and I didn’t hear the rest of what he’d said, because I was so lost in that notion. I think I disagreed a little confusingly and someone else mercifully took the conversation over before I could look any stupider than I undoubtedly already did, which was quite kind of them. It’s been a while since I’ve built a guitar from scratch and really don’t think of myself as a luthier. However, I might have bulked at the title back then even if I had heard it before, given that it’s hard to think of the guitar work I’ve done as amounting to the level of craftsmanship that “luthier” implies to me, though I’m pretty sure he was correct, at least in a strict, literal sense.
(little side note, the spellcheck on the CMS backend of WordPress is absolutely certain that “Luthier” is not a real word, but then it also just flagged “WordPress” as a spelling mistake. So that’s fun.”)
Autodidact, which basically means self-taught, also came to me when in a conversation where I was talking about a side project and someone much smarter than I was all, “Oh, so you’re an Autodidact”, and I was all, “the fuck you just…”. The term felt off to me, for a number of reasons, not the least being some nebulous feeling of undue pride. I’m sure this comes from the extremely bad experiences and interactions I and so many others have had with people who claim to be self educated. This compounds when you begin to understand those making this claim and break them down into groups. Some of the most adamant of “self learners” absolutely did not teach themselves anythings, and instead were just watching youtube and reading bad reddit posts from bad reddit posters. Another annoying subset of those people actually did go to college and seem to think they learned nothing from that experience, even when the thing they brag about teaching themselves was literally a class they took. What are you bragging about, that you didn’t pay attention and wasted money? I have a feeling that if I did any research on the subject, I’d find that it’s one of those classic American myth maker backgrounds that a certain type of douche just loves to claim, like being a self-made millionaire while failing to mention how their rich parents paid their way through everything. I’m sorry, “invested in them”. This is yet another subject I feel like I could go on forever about, and maybe I will, but not today.
Anyway, of the education euphemisms I’ve come across lately, the best fit for my current situation is something along the line of “self-paced education”. This leaves a lot of room for a variety of learning paths and styles, including any mix of traditional college, vocational classes, in person, online, old books, worksheets, non-traditional yackings, you name it. Anything you can hodge-podged together into learning counts. And that kinda works for me.
To wrap up the greater point of the educational… I don’t know, let’s call it a scheme. The Educational Scheme I’m driving towards right now is to more or less follow a college curriculum and use free-or-cheap college resources to get up to a college graduate understanding of my chosen fields of study. Bit of a mouthful, and I have more to say on it, but I think that will be another post. What I will say today is that the landscape of resources available to us all now, much of which is free, is incredible. When you get a good look at it all, it’s hard not to feel like there is an educational revolution just begging to happen. Fingers crossed the current administration and otherwise political climate don’t ruin that along with everything else.
So that’s sorted, let’s get a little specific before closing for the day. Just a smidge.
I’ve set down some very basic criteria for my first round of chosen subjects:
- I will need them for a degree and will still find them useful if I don’t pursue college
- I am directly interested in them or it would benefit the pursuit of my interests if I studied them
- I can find a healthy variety of resources to learn them from
- I can, if I choose to (and I think I will), get college credit for them (or useful equivalent, like a professional certification)
Not everything I’m studying meets all four. For a related side note, I’m like a chapter or two from finishing a book on the subject of learning. The book piqued my interest because it’s basically talking about what I was planning on doing, and I was hoping it would give me either direction or clarity. Now that I’m so far into it, I find it absolutely is talking about what I’m trying to do, and it’s been a good read. It’s also been helpful, giving me some good ideas, a combination of starting points and well worn strategies . I’m hoping for a bit more, and the book’s forward, table of contents, and first chapter implied it would give me that in the form of overarching actionable advice. I haven’t gotten to that just yet, though it should be coming up next. I’ll name the book and give my opinion on it when I finish. But it’s not going to directly lead to a degree, is the point, and that truth isn’t a problem given that it could help me get through the journey a little bit better, more quickly, and less haphazardly. No red squiggly on “haphazardly”, huh? Alright, cool.
Likewise, I’m also picking back up some interests that I just like, regardless of whether they satisfy even one item on the list. I’ve been digging back into playing music, woodworking, and gadget tinkering hobbies. I don’t know if anything from that trio can lead to whatever my main focus will be, or work, or side hustle, or anything really. Heck, I’m a terrible musician. But I love to play music, and that helps me, if indirectly, to just get by in this shit world of ours. And that’s a good enough reason for me.
With those and the more formalized subjects I am pursuing, one thing I want to do on this site is to talk about that experience. Talk about what I’m learning, talk about how I’m going about learning it, how things are going, and so on. I keep getting about halfway into writing about how I’m doing in this subject or how learning that this is going, and then realizing that it’s not what I want to go up as the first post on it. That should be no surprise, I mean this post had a few unnecessary stops along the way. And that’s the point of this point, to give a point to start the conversation. A sort of “starting point”, if you will. Woof. I need an editor.
That’s why one of the subjects is English Composition, sometimes called College Composition or Introduction to Writing. If I do the college thing, I’ll need credit for that class. Moreover, I’ll need what I should learn from the class to actually succeed in other classes further down the line. The big positive upshot is that even if I don’t do the college thing, it’s still something that would be useful. I love to write, and I haven’t been doing it much outside of just the most awful corporate office procedure documents for years, and man, writing those things sticks. The style guild on a corporate doc is basically “stuffy turd potato, double-spaced”, and they only ever get read by other workers that are skipping every other sentence or managers that are desperate to have a thing to correct so they can justify their bullshit jobs. I think it would do wonders for me to just write something fun again.
I’m planning to come in later this week and write some more about my English Comp experience. The experience has already proven itself worth discussing, and I’m likely to dedicate an entire post to just one of my shortcomings in the class. Here’s a preview to that – Citation and References: Aaron Stinks At Them. The rest of the subjects I’ve hit so far are easy peasy, stuff we should all already know, really. Though I could really use some practice on writing essays… not really sure how to go about that. Guess I could harass my friends for help, but that doesn’t exactly sound like a fun time.
The second subject is College Algebra, which also deserves its own post. I was really happy when I got far enough into it to relieve my fear that I had lost all of my previous math prowess. Before starting, I was really worried that I would have to go back to remedial math or that I just couldn’t do it at all, effectively shutting this entire experiment down before it even starts. It was a real boost to my mood and motivation when I found that I could still factor. Better still when I came to feel I better understand now how logarithms work then I ever did in high school. This is not a good paragraph, and I’m somehow both getting really ahead of myself and somewhat behind the point. That’s some more proof that I could use those Composition classes right? Also, I need a lot more work on logs before I can declare I actually get them. So a post on that is forthcoming.
The other classes I’m taking are Microeconomics, Macroeconomics, and Computer Science. There are other subjects that I’m tracking, but that is the list that I am most actively pursuing at the moment. The Econ stuff is mostly out of interest, though that interest is strong, and I have, so far, found it easy. CS, on the other hand, I’m not that interested in on its face. It’s more like the results of having had learned it will be useful, you dig? I’ve had some pretty meaningful successes in my professional life with some really low-level coding, and I’ve found a shitload of fun and fulfillment in personal coding projects. I think my side interest in CS may turn to something else and having had that class will be extremely useful. At present, the most likely suspect is some discipline of engineering. But let’s hold up a minute on the whole getting ahead of myself stuff.
Alright, this is at least a whole page-scroll longer than I’d meant it to be. I have more to say, big surprise, but it’s late and this isn’t going to help me get to bed on time, so let’s start wrapping things up. Maybe that essay practice will help with my shitty brevity. We’ll plan to follow up on all of this as we go. Fuckin’ “we”, like it’s a group over here or some jazz. It’s just me, the notable Aaron. You know, this guy? With the thumbs? Yeah, that’s right.
