Posts tagged with class.
The benefits of accidental knowledge
I was an amazing student recently. I got out of bed a good half hour before I had to leave the house, which gave me enough time to shave, brush my hair, and chase my morning caffeine pill with a piece of toast. Every textbook I needed was in my bag, and I even had an extra pen. It was a fresh, sunny morning, and as I walked to class, I swear there was a bounce in my step.
I sat down in the lecture hall just as class was about to begin, and brought out my notes from the previous day. The subject was linguistics, and the topic was the International Phonetic Alphabet. It's sort of confusing for me, because there are a lot of unfamiliar symbols involved. But the morning was going so flowingly, unfailingly well, that I was sure I would be able to handle anything the professor threw at us.
Then, as the clock struck the hour, a man I did not recognize stood up in front of the class and began talking about weather patterns in the Mesozoic period.
The single flaw in my otherwise perfectly-conceived morning was that I was exactly one hour late for everything. As I was arriving in class, the class I was supposed to be attending was leaving. And as the professor began discussing the barometric pressure changes over Pangaea, my next class - English - was starting on the other side of the campus.
It's good, once and a while, to screw up. Even better, to do so in such an obvious and yet irrevocable way that you feel like a complete idiot. It knocks away that pretense that so many of us like to establish, the one that says we're in control and we know what we're doing. It's a handy pretense, because it can make life smoother and calmer. But letting go of it once and while can open new doors - even if they're the wrong ones.
I think every student should go the wrong class at least once. Doing so gives you the opportunity to learn from your mistakes in the most literal sense. And it doesn't necessarily have to be done in error. In fact, you'd probably do better to go out of your way to sit in on a different lecture. That way you don't end up missing a class you should have attended, like I did. And while hitting up the wrong lecture might not seem like the most thrilling use of your recreational hours, there are benefits to the experience that make it different from sticking to your usual timetable.
For starters, you can leave whenever you want. If Ancient Greek Poetry in Translation turns out to be even more boring than you thought it would, you can take your leave without worrying about missing any notes for the final examination. (That being said, resist the temptation to sigh dramatically, stand up, and storm out the front doors. Doing so tends to encourage awkward questions from the professor, like "Who are you?")
Most importantly, though, there's the benefit you reap from exposing yourself to an area of knowledge you might never otherwise explore. We tend to draw lines between what interests us and what doesn't, between what is necessary to obtain our degree and what is not. Crossing those lines once in a while shakes up the established order, and can introduce notions or information that might have been completely passed over otherwise. It keeps the definitions of useless and useful information flexible.
After all, you can never be certain when a piece of knowledge might be useful. If I play my cards right, I may be able to pull off a term paper linking the story of the Biblical flood to the Mesozoic fossil record. Or maybe I can just use words like "Mesozoic" to sound smart in casual conversation. Either way, I'm glad I ended up in the wrong place. If your academic life could use a twist, maybe you should give it a shot. Who knows? You may actually learn something.
Tagged with
wrong,
class,
knowledge
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