I see Jes all the time, but she still tells me that she misses me. We had a few weeks where neither of us had work or anything else really going on. Now the distractions are endless.

I am in academic land, a place ten steps removed from the regular life of be-here-now. I just spent the last several hours diagramming sentences for transformational grammar. I love this class. Essentially we use Chomsky’s (who recently came in fourth in a BBC mock election for president of the world) rules for all grammar, as redeveloped by Richard Viet, to make giant Christmas trees of grammatical relationships using matrilineal family tree structure, so that every sentence has two daughters: a noun phrase and a verb phrase. Each of those daughters can have almost unlimited children, but the kids are all born in a certain order. There is great deal made of sisterly relationships.

At the same time, the kids can show up out of natural birth or generational order (mostly because adverbs like to move around, but other things do too), so you have to transform sentences to show the underlying meaning structure that conforms to the rules of Viet’s grammar. I love this stuff. I could do these little puzzles all day long and I will this weekend by doing a comprehensive take home midterm. It’s essentially using geometric proofs to explain outcomes, working back from the answer that is the grammatical sentence. It’s linguistic math.

A student asked the pointed question on Tuesday, “What is any of this stuff used for.” In point of fact it is a branch of the cognitive sciences and perhaps most notably the basis for all computer programming languages. So this word processing that I am doing now, and the blog I will post, all come after and utilize Chomsky’s grammar. Cool huh. And you didn’t think an English degree was good for anything.

Speaking of advanced degrees, there is this academic wisdom that one should always go for the next degree. I am currently working on a parallel degree. I am thinking about trying to transfer to SLU at semester to get my doctorate. I may also look into Wash U. Next semester I am supposed to pay astronomical sums of money to get twelve hours credit for teaching a semester of high school. Instead of getting paid for this work, I would be paying to do the work. This seems more than a little scam-ish to me. These hours would count towards a certification that I am less and less sure that I want.

There is a secondary scam that I am not brooking well, the creation of a portfolio. UMSL is requiring that the portfolio be done in Live Text. Live Text is not shareware and is a little more than a hundred dollars. Someone at UMSL must be related to the developer as there is no reason why all of us should be required to buy this software to compile our portfolios. This is just a petty fiefdom issue and not germane to the central question.

Question: Do you want to be done with college and enter into the workforce to teach high school? If you could do it today, would you? Answer: no. Q: Why? A: It is abundantly clear that an essential component of development in critical thinking, which is what I teach at a most basic level, is transgression. This was in fact the central tenant of my Master’s thesis. At the high school level one is beholden to state standards, district policies, and parental concerns that effectively straightjacket the educational process. One can do it, but just because a person can do a thing does not mean that they should do that thing. I am better served and I can be of better service by teaching at the college level. Everyone I interact with at the H.S. level asks me what I am doing there. I don’t fit.

I’ve loved these classes thus far. They’ve reclaimed my mind from the three year “professional” slumber that I had working at the H.A.C. I am a better teacher and person for having taken them. They are all graduate hours that for the most part can be fed into my overall Ph.D. hours. But who cares about the where the hours fit when all the knowledge fits in my head. I have to put job thinking in the trash. I am getting a Ph.D. because I can and because I want one. Job thinking will make you crazy.

My educational crucible has not yet begun to burn.