An inquiring mind?
I pondered long and hard over naming this blog – I wanted something that somehow reflected who I was, but that left plenty of scope for exploring my wide and varied interests.
As a young child, rumour has it that one of my first words was “what?”, closely followed by “why?” – mum tells stories about me following her around asking “what you just doing now, mum?”, “why you just doing that?” and “what are you just going to do next?” (and no, I don’t have any idea where the “just” came from).
Starting school was something I eagerly anticipated – somewhere to find out the answers to all my questions. But, that wasn’t how it worked out, as I quickly became caught up in the quest for better and better test and exam results. The insatiable drive to understand things was consumed by a need to be perfect, to know everything I was supposed to know, or at least to know it well enough to be able to perform when tested.
There were glimpses of my former self – the chance as a primary school student to spend half a day a week at a high school learning (among other things) to build a crystal radio and to program a computer (using punch cards – ok, so I’m in my forties, and it was a while ago) – and a high school maths teacher willing to spend some of his spare time teaching me some of the interesting maths and physics that wasn’t in the curriculum – and who gave me a large book called “Physics for the Inquiring Mind”.
But I found myself going fairly thoughtlessly from high school on to university, just as everyone expected me to – studying maths, computing and science subjects – but still only really motivated by the need to excel at the exams. So, when I got married at the end of second year university and started struggling to combine married life and study in third year I found it relatively easy to drop out and leave the academic world behind me.
And so I went on, through a divorce, getting myself a government office job, a computing qualification, a better government job, a move to sunny Queensland and yet another government job. Then, in late 1997, I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome and had to stop working (I was later retrenched from my job and I haven’t worked since).
I found I had lots of time to think, to ponder my life, and one day, several years ago, to pull Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” out of my bookshelf where it had sat unread for years and actually read it. And I remembered that part of me that wants to know why things are the way they are, how things work, the “me” who just has to ask “why?”. So now, I have a slightly larger collection of (as yet mostly unread) popular science books, and I’m enrolled in a self-paced distance education course revisiting high school maths and science. And one day, the dream is to understand modern physics – and all the maths involved – to be able to read the newsgroup sci.physics.research and have at least some of it make sense.
As a young child, rumour has it that one of my first words was “what?”, closely followed by “why?” – mum tells stories about me following her around asking “what you just doing now, mum?”, “why you just doing that?” and “what are you just going to do next?” (and no, I don’t have any idea where the “just” came from).
Starting school was something I eagerly anticipated – somewhere to find out the answers to all my questions. But, that wasn’t how it worked out, as I quickly became caught up in the quest for better and better test and exam results. The insatiable drive to understand things was consumed by a need to be perfect, to know everything I was supposed to know, or at least to know it well enough to be able to perform when tested.
There were glimpses of my former self – the chance as a primary school student to spend half a day a week at a high school learning (among other things) to build a crystal radio and to program a computer (using punch cards – ok, so I’m in my forties, and it was a while ago) – and a high school maths teacher willing to spend some of his spare time teaching me some of the interesting maths and physics that wasn’t in the curriculum – and who gave me a large book called “Physics for the Inquiring Mind”.
But I found myself going fairly thoughtlessly from high school on to university, just as everyone expected me to – studying maths, computing and science subjects – but still only really motivated by the need to excel at the exams. So, when I got married at the end of second year university and started struggling to combine married life and study in third year I found it relatively easy to drop out and leave the academic world behind me.
And so I went on, through a divorce, getting myself a government office job, a computing qualification, a better government job, a move to sunny Queensland and yet another government job. Then, in late 1997, I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome and had to stop working (I was later retrenched from my job and I haven’t worked since).
I found I had lots of time to think, to ponder my life, and one day, several years ago, to pull Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” out of my bookshelf where it had sat unread for years and actually read it. And I remembered that part of me that wants to know why things are the way they are, how things work, the “me” who just has to ask “why?”. So now, I have a slightly larger collection of (as yet mostly unread) popular science books, and I’m enrolled in a self-paced distance education course revisiting high school maths and science. And one day, the dream is to understand modern physics – and all the maths involved – to be able to read the newsgroup sci.physics.research and have at least some of it make sense.
posted by Anonymous at 5:50 pm link
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home