Tag: learning

Lifelong Learning

October 17, 2015

I am sitting in ‘my’ study carrel at the university, the one I’ve been using on and off for thirty-something years.  Today I noticed some new(ish) graffiti on one side: ‘Today is my last day in the library EVER’.

How sad I find this, because it implies to me that the person who wrote it finds learning, books, and study a chore, or worse than that, just something to be endured so that real life can begin.  I’ve come to the library today not to write, as I often do, but to check out books, something I’m allowed to do as an alumna, and these are books I need for my new course.  While learning and books aren’t my whole life by any means, they remain – even thirty years after graduation from university – a hugely important part of it.

I am unbelievably excited about this new course – The Archaeology of Landscape I, offered through the University of Exeter Distance Learning program.  Unlike the two I took last fall and winter, this one wasn’t free, so I had to really think about whether or not I wanted to spend the money (and time) such a course requires.  But it really wasn’t that hard a decision.

And now I’m looking at a pile of seven books to be read for the first three weeks of the course.  They have titles like “Ideas of Landscape” and “Imagined Country:  Society, Culture and Environment”. I can imagine what most of you are thinking!  But for me, this is feeding a deep need.

And that’s what the best learning is about.  Don’t turn your back on it, just because school and university were perhaps not quite what you hoped.  I can remember being less than impressed with some aspects of my graduate program and quite a few of my undergraduate.  High school was worse.  Then I taught, and was less than impressed with some of what the curriculum required.  I did my best to make it relevant and interesting, but it was a hard go sometimes.

But now I am (again, as I did last fall) learning for the love of it, learning things that will change forever the way I see my world.  Someone (maybe George Bernard Shaw?) said once that education is wasted on the young. I don’t agree with that, but it is certainly not the sole province of the young.  My father was telling me of new things he’d learned through reading and documentaries to within a few weeks of his death at 98.  I hope, very much, to emulate him.

In Another Life

October 16, 2015

How many times have you used that phrase?  I have, many times, and usually about the same thing:  my career choice. Had I known, forty years ago, there was such a profession as landscape archaeologist…well, my life might look very different now.

A landscape archaeologist interprets and translates human-built or human-transformed landscape features as part of a larger understanding of human settlement and history. On a simplistic level, it’s what I’m doing when I walk in the regrowth forests east of my village, and stumble over a limestone-boulder boundary wall hidden deep in the trees, and interpret that as evidence that these treed lands were once cleared and farmed. Or when I look at my local landscape on Google Earth, and see the roddens, the ‘ghosts’ of waterways that still show under ploughed soil, indicating that these croplands were once marsh.

For whatever reasons, landscape archaeology calls to me. I can study maps and Google Earth for hours on end. When I walk in a landscape, I’m looking for those hints of land use and habitation. But, until the great British TV series Time Team, I hadn’t a clue there was a profession that did this too. I imagine BD still remembers my reaction on discovering that Time Team member Stewart Ainsworth got paid to do exactly that.  And so for twenty years or so, I’ve been saying ‘In another life, I’d have been a landscape archaeologist’.

Except there isn’t another life. There is only this one. I’m nearly fifty-eight, and I have no reason to pursue a career as a landscape archaeologist. But why should I not pursue it as an amateur, in the true meaning of that word – one who does something for the love of it?

In this digital, connected, on-line world, I can take courses from anywhere. Including courses from the British universities of Exeter and/or Cambridge on various aspects of landscape archaeology. I could, in theory, even get a degree through on-line studies. I doubt I’ll go that far….but who knows? I’m going to start with an introductory course and see where it leads. In this life.