Grad School

At least once a week now, I take the long road to the university at the end of this tiny world. It is often a Thursday morning; it is mostly a Friday morning. I go to meet my supervisor, to work with thought, to read and try to understand the ideas that others have had about education.

Occasionally, I am disappointed; the emperor has no clothes after all, when it comes to specific areas of education. Sometimes, I am enthralled; the emperor is fully clothed and flaunting it. This is more often the case with stuff coming out of the British Isles and some of its nearer neighbours in the Netherlands and Scandinavia.

Sometimes, the emperor is dressed as something else, or dressed with something else, beyond the grasp of my creativity. Perhaps it is an emperor penguin I'm looking at, or an emperor waltz; perhaps it is a gem of the empirical. I sit here and read, and am amazed by what I read. Sometimes, I am not sure these people aren't having me on.

When such a thing happens, when it all looks like it's gone pear-shaped in the reasoning or (worse) pie-shaped in the statistics, I retreat to the café, where at least some people are pretending to be human. I actually got an A once in a module on café analysis. I'm not kidding. It's one of those things you must be able to do, in the social sciences.

And here we are. So much to know, and no idea whether we ever will.