Addicted to Knowledge

I always loved school. From preschool on, I always enjoyed being taught anything by anyone. I have educators for parents and it is likely no coincidence that having something thoughtfully and cogently explained to me, with plenty of time and patience for questions, feels a lot like a loving embrace to me. There are few things I like better than a thoughtful and cogent explanation. I am also good at learning—I understand what I hear and remember well, I had high reading and listening comprehension and a huge receptive vocabulary from earliest childhood (remember when they used to do those very specific tests for those things?) and although I have no innate facility with things like math or music or languages, or many other things, my memory is so good and I’m so patient about learning, and had so much study support at home, for years and years in school there was no discernible difference between things I was actually good at and things I wasn’t but got good grades in anyway through sheer academic effort. I was, and am, a very good student.

You’ll note that what I’m describing here isn’t quite the same thing as being intelligent—it’s another one of those Venn diagrams that looks like a butterfly, I think. History will decide how smart I am, and apparently history has debunked the idea of “learning styles,” but I am someone who thrives in a traditional classroom. All through public school, high school, undergrad. Then I said I had had enough school, lasted 6 months, started my publishing certificate at night after work. Finished that, immediately started night classes in creative writing, which were the gateway drug to an MA in creative writing. Then I did actually pause for a few years, before attempting a project management certificate only to quit after one course. I got an A but it was AWFUL.

Nobody wanted to TEACH ME ANYTHING. This had occurred occasionally in the publishing certificate too, although most of it was good—occasionally we’d have a class where a harried professional would just gas on for a while about what their job was like. There was information to be gleaned from them, occasionally, but it was not cogent and did not resemble lessons. The project management class was all like that, and I was older, wiser, busier and I like project management far less than I like publishing—I quit after one class and never finished the certificate, despite other later attempts. It’s so boring and I’ve never seen anyone teach it well, though I’ve heard it can be done.

I am a very good student but I still require a good teacher to complete the dance, especially with subjects where I have no natural aptitude. When I was a child and had bad teachers, I would just bring the work home and whichever parent was so inclined would read through the lesson, learn it themselves, and reteach it to me. No one exactly ever helped me with my homework so much as they helped me learn to become able to do the work myself. Sometimes my mom read the novels assigned in class so that she could talk about them with me. My parents are good teachers.

Anyway, this summer I completed my public relations and communications certificate. It took about 14 months to take the four courses, and cost me about $1200—not a lot, all things considered, although the experience was fairly wretched. I know lots of academics and I feel terrible about how much work is heaped upon them, how their institutions push for instructors to do so much with so little, and they are still grinding out excellent classes. What I had never seen before this class—because my friends are all excellent teachers—is that some people just give their employers the dollar value of the work they are paid for, or even less, and it’s the students that suffer.

I was taught very little in the entire program, and sometimes what I was taught did not really make sense. Instructors skipped classes, ghosted office hours, and cut off a 3-hour seminar after 40 minutes most weeks. Their lecture slides were from previous years, the learning management system was never updated, and there were zero class discussions. I was unable to even get my papers back at the end of term, so although I got grades on them, I don’t know why. (I should say, except for the one cross-listed marketing class, which was decent, although the instructor did talk a lot about his dogs—otherwise, he tried hard and seemed to really want to teach us stuff!)

Mark taught me most of the material for the entire certificate. He’d done most of the types of work being studied and I always knew he could, but you can’t put “husband” on your resume so I figured I would need to go an accredited institution and that’s what I ended up doing but it was Mark who really deserved the $1200. The accredited courses turned out to be terrible (except the marketing one), but they did send me a nice certificate in the end and everyone congratulated me on LinkedIn, which is I suppose why one does these things.

And I really do know all the things the certification says I know, because Mark is very experienced and a good explainer. It was nice to curl up next to him on the couch and have him talk me through briefing notes and crisis communications, even though he took all the exclamation points out of everything I wrote. He was right to do that. I don’t think I would have married someone who isn’t good at explaining things—I find it too important.