Best Days

[owlfish]

I've heard people reminisce about how high school was the best time of their life.
I've heard people reminisce about how university was the best time of their life.
I've never heard anyone reminisce about how grad school was the best time of their life.

Why? Do I need to wait ten years until daily self-doubt has become a fading memory for my colleagues? Or is it that the goals of graduate school are so spread out that it's harder to achieve a feeling of accomplishment at regular enough intervals? Or is it that grad school is ultimately done for professional purposes, that it's a transitional credentialling and rarely an end in its own right? Or perhaps it's that those who really love grad school never end up in conversations which cause them to reflect that life was better back then?

Comments

[owlfish]

And I didn't qualify my statements enough. That final "grad school" line should have been just about dissertating.

The social elements are, I suspect, why most people who've responded to this enjoyed their MAs more unadulteratedly than their PhDs.

It's such a pity that teaching ends up being rated as a second-class activity when it's so important. This week's mediev-l discussion on accountability is indirectly relevant here: how to rate and account for adequacy of teaching? It's easier to run down list of what publications have been accomplished.

Your comment has left me with incoherent thoughts on the changing status of various professions. Low-class surgeons in antiquity. Teachers/people-who-know-things-and-pass-them-on as keepers of tradition, preservers of community knowledge and their differing importance among communities over time. I wonder if there's any correlation at all between the widespread "we are all individuals" concept and the "new research is better than old teaching" presumption. How was the teaching/research status balance before the '60s?

[a-d-medievalist.livejournal.com]

My gut feeling is that things were somewhat different -- the GI Bill changed things dramatically in the States, and I think that the big changes in opening up university education to a far greater number of people (theoretically) happened across Western Europe at about the same time. Truthfully, it's still much more stratified and class-based than it seems -- university education in Europe might be open to all qualified applicants, but those who will or won't qualify tend to be pared down fairly early. For me, that's not a problem, in that I don't think everybody needs a university education, but my experience is that much of the paring happens along class and race lines, and that's very problematic.

Back to the US, one of the funny things is that, at least in History, there are a lot of SLACs (like the one that hired me, did I mention I have a JOB!!!! --sorry) that are known to produce good future PhDs, and are feeders to the big name Uni's. One of the things that encourages me is that there has been a big push to strengthen the teaching of History and to remind people that it is an academic discipline with its own ways of thinking and writing (again going back to a couple of things on the Mediev-L list and some of the stuff that comes out on H-Teach). I'm reading Sam Wineburg's latest at the moment, and it's really good. It seems that, in having to justify the existence of the field, good teaching is starting to receive more credit. At least, i hope so!