The Blog of Bob and Lindy

When you begin to learn a lot you realize just how little you actually know. In grad school you learn how much you actually don’t know. Before hand you were in ignorant bliss, but now you know that you don’t know. Most of us would like to return to the beautiful state, but there’s no going back. The funny thing about this whole process is that no one else really cares what you know as long as they don’t need to know it.

When one of my friends who are also college students (particularly grad students), that are going into math, engineering, microbiology, genetics, or whatever, whenever they try to explain to me what they are learning I get lost and/or confused. Part of me really wants to learn what they are talking about and part of me would rather care not. Since I have no time to try to learn all of these fascinating subjects I tend to lean towards the later (it would probably take too much work anyway). All the information comes in one ear and out the other. These conversations generally go no where quickly.

My problem with this whole dilemma is that I am beginning to see the flip side. I’m in school all day learning about speech-language pathology. Naturally, I can talk about this subject extensively; however, as my friends have already learned, no one cares. I’m glad that someone is learning all about math so that I don’t have to. I assume that someone is glad that I’m learning all about communicative disorders so they don’t have to.

In this whole process of becoming educated we learn that we know nothing and anything we do learn we can’t talk to any body about, but we know deep down that someone is glad that we’re learning this stuff so they don’t have to.