(Having passed the 300 essays mark, I’m entitled to do one about me)
…It’s up to you, oh future business-world person, what you learn in university,…
When I was to become a university student, over the summer before I started, I had to go to the education building and see Sylvia. “You need two science classes,” she said. Since I knew my way around the campus, despite having never enrolled before, I answered, “Easy, I’ll just take the astronomy course and the rocks for jocks.” For the former, I knew students had to go outside at night and sketch the moon. For the geology one, I didn’t know.
A few semesters later, at the department office, I said I was off to go sign up for one of them to get my science requirement done— A professor burst out, “But that’s not a human science!”
I replied, “What? It has to be a human science? Then you’d better tell Sylvia that!” So what to do? Easy: Being a writer, I chose a one semester vocabulary course, very little grammar, in Ancient Greek and Latin. Because I remembered a best-selling author, advising young writers, had recommended taking those languages, adding “I can hear the cries of outrage from here!” And, “Writers need discipline, and if those courses don’t give you discipline nothing will.”
So I learned what generations of physicians and liberal arts majors had learned: It’s easy, and gives you a a new look at words and their connotations that you can’t get any other way. Now I know why dictionaries don’t give mere definitions, denotations, but also the derivatives of the words. It’s fascinating, and it matters.
At my campus toastmasters club, when we put up a sign with the word of the day, I would gleefully run up and parse the word to point out the words behind the syllables. Like children do with dinosaur names. Such fun.
Many of my classmates ended up taking “Sean’s course.” Too bad we hadn’t taken Greek before struggling through anatomy!
For my other science course, since “I didn’t want to end up dissecting dead frogs,” I diligently perused the calendar, and at last cried “Eureka!” As you may recall from recent posts, my program ran a distance course in Gaza, with one teacher at any time being over there. I told my profs, “What if I teach in the Gaza Strip? I need to know about why towns coalesce around an oasis or something.” The course was Geography of Human Settlement: Now I know why there are no shiny new petrol stations downtown, and why the garden centres are located outside the city limits.
Me and my prof, in a tiered lecture theatre, got along fine for that one. I remember he and I, after class, telling an older businessman, (complete with suit and tie) that no, you can’t blame the Third World countries for not paying back their loans, after they have borrowed for things like massive power dams… because we in the west had twisted their arms to take the loans. The businessman hadn’t known: he been blaming the victim.
Just because you’re a businessman from the First World doesn’t mean you know economics: just ask that former student with an economics degree, Donald Trump.
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Sean Crawford
Calgary,
September
2025
Blog note: My stats always go down in September, so this is a good time to sneak in a post about me. I promise I will never, complete with photo, blog what I had for breakfast.
Reading a blog site: What I do, if I find a new exciting blog, is try not to plod through them all in reverse order, lest I get too tired out.
(Of course I bookmark it)
Instead, I merely read from a month in a previous year, or the essays within a given month, going back years. The recent posts will still be there, but this way is more fun.
