Frustrations with Academia

This year I have really been wondering what I'm doing here at school. I have been daydreaming way more than usual about dropping out of school. I want to move to where work is, and spend the rest of my life working a minimum wage job in the public service sector. This would allow me to be kind to people who might be having bad days. I would spend my time off volunteering to help the poor and being an ear for anyone who might need to be listened to.

I just want to escape the empty universe of academia.

I do not want to give up my analytical mind and my search for understanding (as long as I continue to attempt to ballance this with an appreciation of the things that don't make sense...see previous blog post).

However, I feel like people at my school are not sitting around trying to figure out the universe, or even trying to appreciate the beauty of its complexity.

I need to go back to the begginning in order to explain my lack of satisfaction with my current situation.

I think I have mentioned this before, but I took a year off in between high school and University.

I have also mentioned that my dad died the summer I was in between grades ten and eleven.

I think I took that year off after highschool because I felt like being preocupied with school kept me from dealing with my emotions as well as my intelectual and spiritual confusions.

I wanted to just work for a year so my spare time could be used to figure things out.

I tried crazy hard to find a job, but it didn't work.

I was getting depressed because I felt like a useless waste of space, and by October I was feeling pretty hopeless and wondering what I should do and where I should go.

I read a novel that I can't even remember the plot of any more. I don't want to give its name as I haven't read it in three years and, for all I know, current me would think it is horrible. However, past me thought it was fabulous. I was so moved by that novel that I decided to go to university.

I did not come here to get a degree that would lead me to my dream job. (Although after I decided what I wanted to study and where I realised that such an education would enable me to do something which, at that time, I decided was pretty much my dream job. .)

I did not come here because my teachers told me to (although they did think it was my destiny),

Or because society obligated me to do so (being rebellious, this was one of my main reasons for wanting to stay far away from university).

I came for the experience.

I wanted to talk to people about books.

I came to learn. I didn't really think about what the professors would be saying to me, I just assumed it would help me understand literature better. I assumed it would be enlightening and helpful.

I did not get what I wanted.

Myself and my peers have been taught a language, and we have been taught what kind of observations professors look for from their students.

Most of the things I really want to say would be considered surface value and unintelligent.

I want to say, this book was beautiful, it taught me so much about the problems with how people work. It taught me about myself because I could see myself in the vilains.

They don't want me to say this. They want me to point out the metaphors, make comparisons between texts, and point out the affects of how the text works.

I hate all this stuff. Metaphors anger me.

Anallagies and similies are really awesome because they are straightforward and intended. Similies can help people understand one thing by openly comparing it to something that people already know more about.

Metaphors don't say that they are comparing two things, and they don't say why they are comparing two things, they just do it. It's confusing and pointless, and whats more, half of the time I wonder if we are making it up. Is the owl really symbolic for the soul of her dead mother or do we just presume this because we want things to make sense, we want the dead to be able to send back a sign, and we want there to be a reason for the owl to be there. Doesn't all of this just go back to the arrogance of us human beings who are constantly trying to make sense of things? I like to take things I read at face value. In my mind a poem about a tree is a poem about a tree and that is enough.

I guess that's kind of funny seeings as I'm always trying to understand my world. Why don't I try to understand books? I do try to understand what books show me about the world, but this is considered to be unacademic. In academic circles books should not be read as something containing a moral. That's how I read books. That's how I've always read books.

I was homeschooled until the end of grade eight, and, throughout that time, my mother started every day by reading a story. More than the math, spelling, grammar, science, history, art, and French that we would study later on in the day, it is those stories that have stuck with me.

From those stories I learned more about history than I ever did in any textbook.

From those stories I developed the life skill of empathy.

From those stories I learned about far away things, places, politics, traditions, cultures, or religions.

From those stories I learned about what it means to be human. It is those stories that taught me how evil we all are, but that(with Jesus, who usually wasn't explicitly mentioned in the stories) there is a possibility for redemption.

I learned about what we have done to eachother.

I learned what it is like to experience true hardship.

I learned about what needs to be done in life to make this place better.

I learned about the importance of expression and telling your own story.

I still love literature. I think of it as entertainment, and beauty, but mostly I think about it as a powerful tool for teaching, understanding(exploration), and also something that can be a catalyst for change.

My professors don't seem to be interested in all of this.

They don't seem to want us to think of the characters as being real.

They don't seem to want us to try to understand the characters and why they did what they did.

They don't seem to want us to relate to the characters, and

They don't seem to want us to focus on what we can learn from these characters.

Well what is the point?

By the end of four years I will know how to speak a meaningless academic language.
That is so encouraging, not.
I suppose I will also know how to clearly argue a point, I will have (hopefully) a better understanding of grammar and spelling, and I will have a degree that might help me find a job.
This is what I'm paying so much for? Is this enough?

The questions I have been asking myself lately are:

Why am I here?

Am I supposed to be here?

Should I stay, or leave?

If I left, where would I go?

I have always prayed generally that God would have His way in my life, although it is only lately that I have taken to praying about specific descisions.

However, I still believe that he directed my paths to this city.

All of the things that led to me chosing university, and this university in particular, are so random that (being an arrogant human who thinks I can understand everything if I try) I just can't help but think that it was planned and I was supposed to come here.

I also think this because of all of the summer opportunities I have had which helped me grow so much and would not have been available to me if I had not met the people that I met here.

Most importantly, I do not regret my descision to come here because of how much I (think I)have grown spiritually and I guess just as a person in general since I have come here.

However, I am plagued by the question of what to do next. Do I finish my B.A. and if I do then do I go on to my M.A. or do I need to abandon academics. If I do abandon them, what do I do instead.

I realise this has just been a whole lot of personal ramblings about my life (which I guess all my posts are).

I'm sorry if this bothers you.

I do this because I value honesty.

I enjoy knowing what other people are going through because I can relate to and learn from their experiences.

I feel like it is presumptuous of me to say I hope you can relate to or learn from my experiences, mistakes, thoughts, understandings, and confusions, but deep down that is what I hope, and that is why I am so redonculously honest all the time.

ARagTagHooligan