Earth Science for athletics
There was a time when I referred to myself as educated. The audacity!
Let me fill in a few of the blanks. I did my time in school. Kept a seat warm in a classroom, and convinced a teacher that I wasn’t a lost cause. After my allotted time ran out (about the same moment as my money and my interest), I collected the available degrees and moved along. Into the workforce. I believed I had done well. Never thrown out. Never pubically chastised. A perfectly average student, with the right credentials.
But, I now realize that I am akin to a painter, in a smock that bears samples of a lot of colours. My knowledge of too many areas is shockingly minimal. I had the audactiy (that word, again) to believe that some fields of study were more important than others. I even took the time to mock others. Ever heard of “rocks for jocks”? Me too.
Rocks were something you threw, not something you studied. I had no intentions of becoming a geologist. No intention of going down in the deeps to hew pebbles. I had committed the capital sin of the “educated”; I believed that any need for knowledge about rocks would be assigned to others.
Turns out, a course in basic geology might bave been (are your ready?) imterestomg. Useful. Well, it’s not too late. This afternoon, I sat through a recorded lecture (a video on YouTube) that pointed out why we find rocks with red and green in close proximity. The sea. Oxygen. I am pumped. I am not going back to school, but I am going to continue studying. I want to know what the jocks knew.
There are probably other areas where my lifetime of acquired familiarity can use some enhancement. That rocks course was actually “Basic Earth Science” and it was designed for those that also participated in organized athletics.
