As I suspected, the install from yesterday didn’t work, but the problem was a bug in the installer. So this morning I did a new install from scratch and it worked. Diskdruid did a much better job of allocating things this time. And even though it’s not perfect, we’re going to go with it. We’re now having an odd problem with the primary ethernet card. It’s functional, but sometimes the system hangs when trying to take it down (during a reboot). That’s a problem for another day.
I’m not one listen in on other’s conversations, but the three 20-something men at the booth next to me at lunch (Taco Bell–I should be ashamed) were louldy joking about “English majors” and why anyone would bother being one. I think they were engineers, probably working at their first professional jobs (one of them questioned someone else’s “engeneering skills” which doesn’t seem a phrase a non-engeneer would use). As a person with an undergraduate and (very nearly) a master’s degree in English, I was offended, of course. I wondered if they thought the world would be a better place if no one were around to teach writing or literature.
Most people have no trouble with that more pragmatic end (e.g. writing). And most wouldn’t have trouble with the passing along of literature either. It’s the end of the humanities (especially English and Philosophy) concerned with theory which strikes many people as a useless endeavor. I’ll grant that literary criticism isn’t the most important field of inquiry. But I think we’d be better off if people were less concerned with maintaining some mystical hierarchy of “things worth doing” and instead accept that while X doesn’t interest me personally, it does interest an entire group of people enough to persue it for a lifetime. Engineering doesn’t interest me in the least, but I’m glad we have engineers. I wish this particular goup of them could return the favor. Of course, this whole thing could just be bad personal experience with English teachers. When I was a GA, teaching English to the masses, we had special sections of the course tailored to Engineers who, I don’t know why, seem to have a very hard time, as a group, with writing.
Somehow, the sort of snobber I witnessed at lunch reminded me of my own undergraduate snobbery toward education majors (a fairly common target for English majors). Education majors mostly take courses in how to teach, rather than courses in content areas. And it’s rather amazing to me how few of those content courses you can take and get a degree which describes you as something of an expert in that area. I think, at the U of A anway, you can take two sections of world lit and three literature electives and go out into the world as a high school English teacher. That just doesn’t seem enough background for teaching at that level.
What I discovered as I got older is that no major or level of education garantees competence. The requirements for a degree are only the lower-level limit on the preparation needed to do anything well. A high school English teacher who never read more than was required for the degree would surely be uninformed. But it’s silly to assume that a person interested enough in that area to pursue it as a profession wouldn’t also be driven enough to read outside of the curriculum. At a certain point, my goal in pursuing advanced degrees was to assure myself that I knew something. But degrees don’t offer that assurance. They don’t garantee that you know anything; they ceartainly don’t garantee, for lack of a better word, wisdom.