Confessions of an Over-Educated Wench

By last count, I spent eighteen years of my life pursuing a formal education.  I do not regret any of the time I spent in college or graduate school.  In fact, I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to choose classes that truly interested me.  Studying the history of science, or art, or music is a luxury by today’s standards.   I thought it an important hallmark of being educated to read Plato and Aristotle, Dante, Shakespeare, John Locke, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, Jean-Paul Sartre, to name a few.  I had no particular agenda in doing so; I just felt it needed to be done.  

In my earlier years of education I was a good and dutiful student.  I embraced the memorization challenges, the dioramas, the posters, and the extra credits.  In truth, I enjoyed having “projects” to occupy my mind and my hands.  On the other hand, when my children brought home these same assignments I saw them in a different light.  From a parental point of view, many activities were simply busy work.  Most of what I saw at my children’s school was obviously done under the “close supervision” of the parents.  It was funny that a physicists’ kids did physics projects, or that the judge’s kid wrote Constitutional law papers.

I look back somewhat longingly at my education years; but I also question what some of it was all about.   I realize that I have memorized about 1000 lines of poetry, all the state capitals and nicknames, all the presidents in order of their terms, the national anthems of France and Israel (each in their native languages), the periodic table of elements, solid and liquid measurements, all of Hamlet’s soliloquys, English to metric conversions, the counties in the State of Florida, the quadratic equation, dozens of geometry theorems (yes, corresponding parts of congruent triangles are congruent!), all the geological periods of the Earth, and, by virtue of a famous yet obscene mnemonic,  the twelve cranial nerves.  I also possess a rather uncanny ability to solve for X, no matter how deeply it is buried and replicated in a convoluted equation. 

All of this is rather amusing to me at this stage of my life.  I am not foolish enough to argue that none of the trappings of my education are responsible for the successful career I enjoyed.  Certainly we build our analytical and social skills around some basic fundamentals.  Who’s to say that when I imagined how our company might extend the information infrastructure of the hospital to its affiliated doctors’ offices and home care agencies I wasn’t somehow informed by the large Greek pots in the Museum of Fine Arts at which I spent hours staring.  Perhaps the symmetry and fragmentation of thematic material in Brahms’ 4^th Symphony was resonating when I reworked the means for doing hospital case mix analysis.

At the peak of my career, I liked to think that my education was really paying off for me—that the hours of reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic (not to mention a graduate degree in health policy and management) gave me a higher awareness for the plight of hospital administrators who were trying to reckon with the rapidly changing regulations and the information requirements that accompanied them.  But now, at what I believe is the peak of my life, I wonder how much of the knowledge and know-how I spent years gathering is still with me and relevant.  It reminds me of when a friend’s father told him, years ago, “I’ve already forgotten more than you’ll ever know.” 

After paying attention for a few weeks, I have decided that I use very little of what I learned  in school on a daily basis.  There is one notable exception.  During my senior year in high school, when I had more than enough credits to graduate and needed something to do until June, I signed up for a typing class.  With apologies to any of my very excellent former teachers, I have used my typing skills more than any other single thing I learned in high school.  It saved me hours in college because I possessed the ability to translate heavily-edited chicken scratch into a neatly printed manuscript in 30 minutes flat.  Typing also got me jobs during the summer months because I could exceed 50 words per minute on a self-correcting IBM Selectric.  Of course, the time I spent memorizing the parts of a typewriter for a final exam is a slice of life I will never get back.  Perhaps if I ever get on Jeopardy there will be an answer for which I can buzz in and say, “What is a platen?”

The trend to amass factoids continued through college.  As a music major I squirreled away more information about Western music than anyone could ever need.  Just last night at the Symphony, my husband turned to me before Jean-Yves Thibodet took the stage to perform Saint-Saens 5^th Piano Concerto, asking, “Have we heard this before?”  “Oh no,” I answered, “you’ve heard his 2^nd Concerto; this 5^th one is rarely played.”  Studying music leaves you with an easily accessible mental catalog of opus numbers and genres.  The trivia is endless, like the ten composers who wrote exactly 9 Symphonies.  Or the fact that Mozart is said to have written 41 symphonies, however, there is no 37 and there are at least 20 others that are under dispute.  When the Symphony Hall station of XM radio is on in the car, my husband likes to see if I can “Name that Tune” in less than 3 notes.  Truthfully, it doesn’t usually take that many.  Don’t mistake this for bragging.  I am seriously struggling to understand whether there is any intrinsic value to being “Google Unplugged.”

One of the silliest things I ever learned is a trick for remembering the “relative minor” for each major key.  Every major key  (C major, G major, D major. . .) has a unique “key signature”—the number of sharps or flats that defines that key.  For example, A major has 3 sharps (F#, C#, G#) and B-flat major has 2 flats (B-flat, E-flat).  A relative minor is the minor key that shares the same key signature as a major key.  The relative to A major is F# minor and the relative to B-flat is G-minor.  My first piano teacher taught me a ridiculous hopping tune (duh-dum, duh-dum, duh-dum) where you start at the major key and then sashay downward in 3 half-steps to find the relative minor key.  To go from minor to major, simply reverse the tune upward.  It is utterly ridiculous, but it stuck at a very young age and has never failed me.  Linking relative majors and minors is critical information when you are analyzing a great symphony, as it sometimes helps to explain the tonal plan of the movements or to make sense of a harmonic journey during an intricate development section.  It offers no value, however, when you are doing estate planning, choosing a candidate to back in the next election, or calculating the impact of refinancing your mortgage.

The other day someone asked me whether August had 30 or 31 days.  I resorted to an old tool I was taught so long ago I can no longer remember its origin.  I made a fist and counted my knuckles and in-between, starting with January.  The knuckles are the months with 31 days and the valleys in-between are the months with 30 (or 28).  For August, you double count the last knuckle and head back toward the starting point.  Of course, August has 31 days.  But what does it mean that I use this simple convention more often than a quadratic equation, or the capital of Montana, or the birthday of the 19^th President of the United States. 

I suppose in the end, it’s never been about what we know but how we use it.   As Dostoyevsky said, “It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.”