A college educaton vs. experiance
- Thread starter Froggy
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NickfromWI
Addicted to ArboristSite
Well, too late. I already graduated. I asked if I could go back for another 4 years....they said no.
love
nick
Jock
ArboristSite Operative
I've got 22yrs practical experience, and last year decided on a 2 year one day a week course, which will give me an HNC (Arb) learned a mountain of stuff and am thoroughly enjoying it although business pressures can sometimes knock you behind on studies, luckily i'm in hotels week nights just now and am trying hard to keep on top of everything....personally i think it'll be a personal achievment if i get through this. I think anyone with a natural passion for trees should always want to learn more, regardless of age or status within the industry. Jock
Bob Wulkowicz
ArboristSite Operative
Stephen Wiley
ArboristSite Lurker
"....self assured beyond their ability !"
One in the same I would say looking at above posts!
E.G.:"Yeah I went to college got exposed to lots of things I don't know about, still don't - can't remember, but I got the tools to education. Now.......what did I do with them."
Not very reassuring is it!
Fact is: each indvidual will get out of higher education what he/she is willing to put into it and retain.
Education is not limited to College's, University's, or even trade school's. But rather the individual person's desire, opportunity, and on going love of learning.
Personaly, my observations have been to NOT judge a person upon the amount or lack of education. But rather upon their experience and willingness to learn.
I have met college graduates who are filled with oodles of useless information unable to relate any of it practically. Yet on the other side I have been challenged by graduates who cause themselves and me to ssstttreeetchh the mind.
Is their an answer to this debate? Yes, education regardless of how attained along with willingness to learn, will most likely afford the indvidual opportunities which would not exist with the lack their of.
Clearly, the advantage to having the degree is for employment in governmental positions, or professional organizations.
One in the same I would say looking at above posts!
E.G.:"Yeah I went to college got exposed to lots of things I don't know about, still don't - can't remember, but I got the tools to education. Now.......what did I do with them."
Not very reassuring is it!
Fact is: each indvidual will get out of higher education what he/she is willing to put into it and retain.
Education is not limited to College's, University's, or even trade school's. But rather the individual person's desire, opportunity, and on going love of learning.
Personaly, my observations have been to NOT judge a person upon the amount or lack of education. But rather upon their experience and willingness to learn.
I have met college graduates who are filled with oodles of useless information unable to relate any of it practically. Yet on the other side I have been challenged by graduates who cause themselves and me to ssstttreeetchh the mind.
Is their an answer to this debate? Yes, education regardless of how attained along with willingness to learn, will most likely afford the indvidual opportunities which would not exist with the lack their of.
Clearly, the advantage to having the degree is for employment in governmental positions, or professional organizations.
Bob Wulkowicz
ArboristSite Operative
I wrote this some time ago as a part of a larger piece that I hoped would explain my attitudes and my career. I'm not sure if it was successful and the first part was a writing requirement, an autobiograpy, for an introductory session on a Saturday at DePaul in 1990.
That was a stand-alone piece; a step back into childhood, and a lesson taught by the indifferent and uncaring, which Imoved forward as an autobiographical moment.
There is also a section of Part II, written here; and finding a parallel between a childhood experience and the grownup work-a-day world where I was just leaving a park I had designed and had been meeting with the tradesmen.
I was both elated and filthy with the mud and stains of the new park as I walked to DePaulUniversity that morning. There was nothing green in the vacant lot yet, but I had convinced the workers to find their own sense of pride in what we could create. (This was written 6 years later in another attempt to be <i>educated</i> at another university.)
I left that university as well when they cut down two campus trees, two black willows, that were the core of my dissertation. They knew it. The issue of cutting them down was already in the student newspaper and I had written, not about my thesis, but about when the trees had become a part of the history of the school.
On Friday, the Grounds Department secretary called me to meet with the Department on Monday. On Saturday, they issued an emergency work order to have the trees cut down. I found the ground-down stumps on Sunday when I went to take some pictures--just in case.
I never went back.
----------------
Woven though this thread are the posts of all of you with many feelings about education, and degrees, and a quiet sense of personal worth. Each deserves discussion, but what is almost never talked about is an artificial system, designed to generate revenues, and increasingly pompous and distant from real points of principle and education.
Education shouldn't be paying and enduring, and answering questions in some multiple-choice exams until the bell is rung for the diploma handout.
It ain't what it's cracked up to be. It might have been, but that's dissolved--as I discovered, foolish twit that I was.
<hr>
<i>A Jury of Nuns</i>, from somewhere in the middle...
<hr>
Not having a degree had been consistently troubling for me--some times more so than others. Still, more than once, I had leapfrogged different job requirements and escaped the rituals of obligatory credential sniffing. It was unheard of fifteen years earlier, that I, as an electrician, without one minute in an accounting class, should manage an old private school without a degree.
The fundamental absurdity of this heresy was pointed out one morning by a teacher, furious over some inconsequential item, who shook his fist at me and shouted "You're nothing but an ignorant construction worker."
It was equally difficult to later build parks and other big projects without an hour's worth of time in engineering courses to validate my competency to present new ideas and solutions.
I sat in meeting rooms filled with chuckling and smirking engineers who ridiculed my presentations because the ideas weren't taught to them in schoolbooks long since forgotten or granted the imprimatur of accepted formulas and tables. In their arrogance and aggregate, these juries would have required the Wright Brothers to get pilot's licenses before they could fly the first airplane and the engineers were absolutely smug in the sense they alone held the final edges of knowledge in their hands.
In part, and in defense for these confrontations, I had wanted a degree--as if somehow it might change the audiences; as if somehow I would be accepted as a professional. But in truth, they were the ones who weren't professional.
Far too often, the juries were just anointed and credentialed magpies, strung out on a wire of a fence, squawking and mocking in the joy of their own company, their shrill voices increasing as anything unfamiliar drew near.
I would be lying if I said I wasn't bitter and exhausted over battling antiquated and calcified positions defended with a fervor that was proportion to the fear of change. In those battles, there seemed to be a number of practical reasons to get my degree.
But quietly as well, I was embarrassed in not having a degree, a kind of residual shame of having failed some larger unspoken expectation.
My father once talked about not finishing high school and he too talked of being a disappointment--even though his family had no choice during the Depression. Each of us viewed ourselves by our own generation and had failed our educational imperative; each considered, alone in our thoughts, what we might have been.
---------------
In a still ambivalent mood, I finally signed up at DePaul and found an opportunity to test out of the English writing requirements. I called ahead to pick up a packet of materials to prepare for the test, but instead I was told that the two week closing date had just passed and that materials were not given out after that date. I naively answered that I could waive any complaints of not having enough time to prepare, and it was my responsibility if I flunked the test.
"No, it can't be done," I was told, but I decided to stop in anyway that morning and try to be more persuasive face to face.
Perhaps it was the gravel and sand stains on my trousers, or some recent event where one of the homeless that haunted the McDonald's below had stumbled off the elevator on this floor, because I cooled my heels for quite a while until someone came out to see me.
Finally, allowed to sit across the table from a young anointed woman, I explained my request again and was told it was simply not possible. Obviously prepared for this kind of debate, she said it wouldn't be done. "There's one thing I'll tell you," she said with pointed firmness, "you won't leave here today with that material."
She stood smugly fast against arguments coated with rationality, compassion, or the general theory of insignificance. Humor and righteous indignation merely glanced off of her. And when it was clear that I was profoundly dull-witted and unable to accept the obvious, she excused herself by saying she had a meeting and bid me good-bye.
I sat at the table for a few moments, finally decided it wasn't worth it, and wandered away. My timetables made no difference to them; they were the center of the universe and everything revolved around them. How foolish to question the keepers of the tabernacle.
In DePaul's Discovery Workshop later, a required introductory meeting which resolutely combined educational tokenism with crass revenue generation, we were asked to bring a short autobiography--a reasonable enough request, and also to read a few selected short essays. In the first few hours, I was struck by the honest revisitings of long-past emotions and memories in the various autobiographical pages that were passed back and forth between the prospective students.
Many people admitted to crying while they wrote their individual pieces and the rest kept their heads bowed in silent affirmation of their own emotional effort of reaching back and plumbing their childhood. I was surprised at how many spoke of abuse, how many of prejudice, how many of loss. The woman next to me, Thelma, wrote in halting and awkward prose of a childhood filled with quiet tragedy and she wrote about her hopes of what she still might be.
One of the assigned reading essays was by Richard Rodriquez, the son of Mexican immigrants who went on to get a Ph.D. in English Literature. He told a story of coming quietly one morning into his own library and finding his father, back to the door, looking over the some of the many books on his son's shelves. His father gently touched each book in one particular set, his fingers moving slowly over the tooled leather spines with a reverence born of his own inability to read any of the words suspended inside.
Rodriquez watched his father for a long time, unwilling to interrupt, realizing at that moment what sacrifices his father had made to send him to school, and that those very acts of love had insured a new cultural divide between them forever. He wondered if his father might have given up those same things if he had truly understood the profound consequences of his only son's further education which meant losing him to a distant language and caste.
When his father finally turned, they spoke for a few awkward moments and both finally left to finish a larger family visit. Rodriquez used that moving epiphanal scene to introduce his thoughts for his essay on the subtle cultural losses that minorities face in higher education.
The combination of my required reading of Rodriquez and seeing for just a moment, the raw vulnerabilities exposed in that class between people with a common dream, formed a new perspective for me that I never would have experienced--a respectful appreciation of how each prospective student wanted a resolution of issues, probably never before spoken or admitted. They had wrestled with shame, disappointment, a lust to learn again, or the recapture of things denied. I was truly privileged to see and understand this, and then suddenly I felt very much alone as a spectator, very much isolated in my insight, very much unsure of what this school would ultimately mean to me.
(Conitnued itn the next post)
That was a stand-alone piece; a step back into childhood, and a lesson taught by the indifferent and uncaring, which Imoved forward as an autobiographical moment.
There is also a section of Part II, written here; and finding a parallel between a childhood experience and the grownup work-a-day world where I was just leaving a park I had designed and had been meeting with the tradesmen.
I was both elated and filthy with the mud and stains of the new park as I walked to DePaulUniversity that morning. There was nothing green in the vacant lot yet, but I had convinced the workers to find their own sense of pride in what we could create. (This was written 6 years later in another attempt to be <i>educated</i> at another university.)
I left that university as well when they cut down two campus trees, two black willows, that were the core of my dissertation. They knew it. The issue of cutting them down was already in the student newspaper and I had written, not about my thesis, but about when the trees had become a part of the history of the school.
On Friday, the Grounds Department secretary called me to meet with the Department on Monday. On Saturday, they issued an emergency work order to have the trees cut down. I found the ground-down stumps on Sunday when I went to take some pictures--just in case.
I never went back.
----------------
Woven though this thread are the posts of all of you with many feelings about education, and degrees, and a quiet sense of personal worth. Each deserves discussion, but what is almost never talked about is an artificial system, designed to generate revenues, and increasingly pompous and distant from real points of principle and education.
Education shouldn't be paying and enduring, and answering questions in some multiple-choice exams until the bell is rung for the diploma handout.
It ain't what it's cracked up to be. It might have been, but that's dissolved--as I discovered, foolish twit that I was.
<hr>
<i>A Jury of Nuns</i>, from somewhere in the middle...
<hr>
Not having a degree had been consistently troubling for me--some times more so than others. Still, more than once, I had leapfrogged different job requirements and escaped the rituals of obligatory credential sniffing. It was unheard of fifteen years earlier, that I, as an electrician, without one minute in an accounting class, should manage an old private school without a degree.
The fundamental absurdity of this heresy was pointed out one morning by a teacher, furious over some inconsequential item, who shook his fist at me and shouted "You're nothing but an ignorant construction worker."
It was equally difficult to later build parks and other big projects without an hour's worth of time in engineering courses to validate my competency to present new ideas and solutions.
I sat in meeting rooms filled with chuckling and smirking engineers who ridiculed my presentations because the ideas weren't taught to them in schoolbooks long since forgotten or granted the imprimatur of accepted formulas and tables. In their arrogance and aggregate, these juries would have required the Wright Brothers to get pilot's licenses before they could fly the first airplane and the engineers were absolutely smug in the sense they alone held the final edges of knowledge in their hands.
In part, and in defense for these confrontations, I had wanted a degree--as if somehow it might change the audiences; as if somehow I would be accepted as a professional. But in truth, they were the ones who weren't professional.
Far too often, the juries were just anointed and credentialed magpies, strung out on a wire of a fence, squawking and mocking in the joy of their own company, their shrill voices increasing as anything unfamiliar drew near.
I would be lying if I said I wasn't bitter and exhausted over battling antiquated and calcified positions defended with a fervor that was proportion to the fear of change. In those battles, there seemed to be a number of practical reasons to get my degree.
But quietly as well, I was embarrassed in not having a degree, a kind of residual shame of having failed some larger unspoken expectation.
My father once talked about not finishing high school and he too talked of being a disappointment--even though his family had no choice during the Depression. Each of us viewed ourselves by our own generation and had failed our educational imperative; each considered, alone in our thoughts, what we might have been.
---------------
In a still ambivalent mood, I finally signed up at DePaul and found an opportunity to test out of the English writing requirements. I called ahead to pick up a packet of materials to prepare for the test, but instead I was told that the two week closing date had just passed and that materials were not given out after that date. I naively answered that I could waive any complaints of not having enough time to prepare, and it was my responsibility if I flunked the test.
"No, it can't be done," I was told, but I decided to stop in anyway that morning and try to be more persuasive face to face.
Perhaps it was the gravel and sand stains on my trousers, or some recent event where one of the homeless that haunted the McDonald's below had stumbled off the elevator on this floor, because I cooled my heels for quite a while until someone came out to see me.
Finally, allowed to sit across the table from a young anointed woman, I explained my request again and was told it was simply not possible. Obviously prepared for this kind of debate, she said it wouldn't be done. "There's one thing I'll tell you," she said with pointed firmness, "you won't leave here today with that material."
She stood smugly fast against arguments coated with rationality, compassion, or the general theory of insignificance. Humor and righteous indignation merely glanced off of her. And when it was clear that I was profoundly dull-witted and unable to accept the obvious, she excused herself by saying she had a meeting and bid me good-bye.
I sat at the table for a few moments, finally decided it wasn't worth it, and wandered away. My timetables made no difference to them; they were the center of the universe and everything revolved around them. How foolish to question the keepers of the tabernacle.
In DePaul's Discovery Workshop later, a required introductory meeting which resolutely combined educational tokenism with crass revenue generation, we were asked to bring a short autobiography--a reasonable enough request, and also to read a few selected short essays. In the first few hours, I was struck by the honest revisitings of long-past emotions and memories in the various autobiographical pages that were passed back and forth between the prospective students.
Many people admitted to crying while they wrote their individual pieces and the rest kept their heads bowed in silent affirmation of their own emotional effort of reaching back and plumbing their childhood. I was surprised at how many spoke of abuse, how many of prejudice, how many of loss. The woman next to me, Thelma, wrote in halting and awkward prose of a childhood filled with quiet tragedy and she wrote about her hopes of what she still might be.
One of the assigned reading essays was by Richard Rodriquez, the son of Mexican immigrants who went on to get a Ph.D. in English Literature. He told a story of coming quietly one morning into his own library and finding his father, back to the door, looking over the some of the many books on his son's shelves. His father gently touched each book in one particular set, his fingers moving slowly over the tooled leather spines with a reverence born of his own inability to read any of the words suspended inside.
Rodriquez watched his father for a long time, unwilling to interrupt, realizing at that moment what sacrifices his father had made to send him to school, and that those very acts of love had insured a new cultural divide between them forever. He wondered if his father might have given up those same things if he had truly understood the profound consequences of his only son's further education which meant losing him to a distant language and caste.
When his father finally turned, they spoke for a few awkward moments and both finally left to finish a larger family visit. Rodriquez used that moving epiphanal scene to introduce his thoughts for his essay on the subtle cultural losses that minorities face in higher education.
The combination of my required reading of Rodriquez and seeing for just a moment, the raw vulnerabilities exposed in that class between people with a common dream, formed a new perspective for me that I never would have experienced--a respectful appreciation of how each prospective student wanted a resolution of issues, probably never before spoken or admitted. They had wrestled with shame, disappointment, a lust to learn again, or the recapture of things denied. I was truly privileged to see and understand this, and then suddenly I felt very much alone as a spectator, very much isolated in my insight, very much unsure of what this school would ultimately mean to me.
(Conitnued itn the next post)
Last edited:
Bob Wulkowicz
ArboristSite Operative
<hr>
At the age of seven in a Catholic school, instead of the joy of discovery, I learned the litany of things believed in, worked on, and then cruelly dashed.
I resided in that place where asking questions was to risk being mocked and teachers pivoted noiselessly through lessons that had little substance beyond rote. Indifference, repression, and ignorance were familiar companions to a boy who was unable find his own measure in systems that didn't care and where an assembly line of little faces was continually replaced by other little faces. In defiance and survival, I learned to step back inside the library, quietly place my contributions on the table, and evade the jury of nuns.
The new insights for me in those autobiographies were how many others had been crippled in the same ways and that it hasn't stopped for any of us. It didn't matter what the particular cruelties were, or their weight, or their frequency. We shared the unspoken losses that followed our abandonment; we were kindred spirits of soft melancholy, awkward skeptics of what we might be.
It continues today; not just as the defects of the institutions of the 40's and 50's. Our public schools still engage in the most ugly betrayal of the innocents in their charge and turn out so many listless, sad, dull-eyed, and hollow--perhaps forever unable to ever really taste the sweetness of their own successes and accomplishments. Those children will soon become the same parents who grow impatient and irritable in meetings on their schools; adults who speak poorly at the podium, inarticulate except for their passion in demanding better for their children.
Educational reform will lose to teachers who know better and brook no interference. Change will lose to educators who hover at the center of the universe and cannot be challenged. Those educated and sophisticated strings of magpies will turn away again from the generations to be taught, those new generations will be lost in the swirl, and the poignant cycle will continue.
I think the ear of the educated in the universities hardens to the soft sound of those asking to be taught. Rodriguez speaks with gentle brilliance of the subtle losses that face the minorities as they are urged to learn and grow outside their cultures and families. I grew up in a more simple and gentle time in a very white world, by many measures pampered and sheltered, yet still feeling wanting and somewhat embittered about the lapses and shortfalls of my life. But I stand truly sobered by what I see in the schools today, and on the streets each passing morning, and by what I now understand to be the crucibles endured by minorities.
In my life today, I'm more concerned with the soul of education than its pontifications and I can never escape what I learned from the people at a workshop on a quiet Saturday. Instead of pedantic clichés and illusions, I prefer the humanity of a lesson taught by a black woman who worked for 30 years at the Post Office and still dreams of being a writer. Those are the companions I should seek; those are the innocents I should defend.
DePaul University had no clue as to the folds of magic in that Saturday's morning meeting, and sadly stepped past the hopes of the assembled people there who touched the backs of long-forgotten books and dreamed of reading the things inside.
Bob Wulkowicz
© 1996
<hr>
The full piece is over at
http://users.rcn.com/bobw.enteract/juryofnuns.html
At the age of seven in a Catholic school, instead of the joy of discovery, I learned the litany of things believed in, worked on, and then cruelly dashed.
I resided in that place where asking questions was to risk being mocked and teachers pivoted noiselessly through lessons that had little substance beyond rote. Indifference, repression, and ignorance were familiar companions to a boy who was unable find his own measure in systems that didn't care and where an assembly line of little faces was continually replaced by other little faces. In defiance and survival, I learned to step back inside the library, quietly place my contributions on the table, and evade the jury of nuns.
The new insights for me in those autobiographies were how many others had been crippled in the same ways and that it hasn't stopped for any of us. It didn't matter what the particular cruelties were, or their weight, or their frequency. We shared the unspoken losses that followed our abandonment; we were kindred spirits of soft melancholy, awkward skeptics of what we might be.
It continues today; not just as the defects of the institutions of the 40's and 50's. Our public schools still engage in the most ugly betrayal of the innocents in their charge and turn out so many listless, sad, dull-eyed, and hollow--perhaps forever unable to ever really taste the sweetness of their own successes and accomplishments. Those children will soon become the same parents who grow impatient and irritable in meetings on their schools; adults who speak poorly at the podium, inarticulate except for their passion in demanding better for their children.
Educational reform will lose to teachers who know better and brook no interference. Change will lose to educators who hover at the center of the universe and cannot be challenged. Those educated and sophisticated strings of magpies will turn away again from the generations to be taught, those new generations will be lost in the swirl, and the poignant cycle will continue.
I think the ear of the educated in the universities hardens to the soft sound of those asking to be taught. Rodriguez speaks with gentle brilliance of the subtle losses that face the minorities as they are urged to learn and grow outside their cultures and families. I grew up in a more simple and gentle time in a very white world, by many measures pampered and sheltered, yet still feeling wanting and somewhat embittered about the lapses and shortfalls of my life. But I stand truly sobered by what I see in the schools today, and on the streets each passing morning, and by what I now understand to be the crucibles endured by minorities.
In my life today, I'm more concerned with the soul of education than its pontifications and I can never escape what I learned from the people at a workshop on a quiet Saturday. Instead of pedantic clichés and illusions, I prefer the humanity of a lesson taught by a black woman who worked for 30 years at the Post Office and still dreams of being a writer. Those are the companions I should seek; those are the innocents I should defend.
DePaul University had no clue as to the folds of magic in that Saturday's morning meeting, and sadly stepped past the hopes of the assembled people there who touched the backs of long-forgotten books and dreamed of reading the things inside.
Bob Wulkowicz
© 1996
<hr>
The full piece is over at
http://users.rcn.com/bobw.enteract/juryofnuns.html
M.D. Vaden
vadenphotography.com
Its possible to get 2 educations from some colleges.
At Portland Community College, several of us students liked to eat pizza, or drink beer, or both, after classes.
A couple of the instructors also enjoyed doing that.
The few of us students had no children, and the instructors either had no children, or their children were grown up.
So all of us would sip and snack from about 10pm to midnight 3 days each week after class.
That's where they could teach us information about the industry that was not part of the curriculum, or was not allowed in it.
College was memorable. If its part of the field you enjoy, the memories will last a lifetime. The sessions, the lab, other students, field trips, etc..
One thing about a good college, their programs are the cutting-edge. It means that they are tapped into the most recent of what's happening in the industry.
With slow paced book learning only, someone gets up to speed after the educated have already accelarated from that point.
The steady regular college learning, helped me get up to speed in a hurry, then its easier to maintain the pace by occassional book reading, magazines, or an occassional class or two.
At Portland Community College, several of us students liked to eat pizza, or drink beer, or both, after classes.
A couple of the instructors also enjoyed doing that.
The few of us students had no children, and the instructors either had no children, or their children were grown up.
So all of us would sip and snack from about 10pm to midnight 3 days each week after class.
That's where they could teach us information about the industry that was not part of the curriculum, or was not allowed in it.
College was memorable. If its part of the field you enjoy, the memories will last a lifetime. The sessions, the lab, other students, field trips, etc..
One thing about a good college, their programs are the cutting-edge. It means that they are tapped into the most recent of what's happening in the industry.
With slow paced book learning only, someone gets up to speed after the educated have already accelarated from that point.
The steady regular college learning, helped me get up to speed in a hurry, then its easier to maintain the pace by occassional book reading, magazines, or an occassional class or two.
ArborView
ArboristSite Operative
I haven't logged into here forever. In fact, it took me awhile to get the right the username and password. But I had to reply to this topic. I'm 32 now, but when I when I was in high school my parents wanted me to go to college,so I did. I lasted one semester before I decided I didn't want to be there. I entered the work force and did everything from landscaping to pumping gas to working in a factory. After working in a factory for 6 years, I was about ready to snap, so I told my wife I wanted to go back to school, and she agreed. Right after I quit my job, and enrolled for school, she got pregnant. But I went ahead with it anyway. I got my associate's in Arboriculture and then said what the hell, and got my bachelor's in urban forestry. It was a tough four years but we made it and I ended up with a 3.83 GPA, but I worked my ass off, and we all made sacrifices. While in school I also attained my ISA and Mass Arborist Certifications. While in school and after I graduated, I ran my own tree business. It wasn't much, but it was enough to pay the bills. Then one day I realized that what I was doing was too risky an occupation to have with a family. In reality, I know it's not that risky if you know what you're doing and have a sense of awareness. But I couldn't help thinking about my wife and now, two young kids. Call me a chicken or whatever you want, but that's my deal. I know I could be killed crossing the street, but that's the way i felt. So now I work for a pest control company that mostly takes care of residential properties. Is it what I went to school for? No. Do I like it? Absolutely. It's something different everyday, the pay is excellent, the benefits are great, and I feel good doing it. My college background definetly played a big part in getting the job though. I had a lot of pesticide and entomology related courses and just the fact of pursuing a college degree coming from the work force was a big factor. I don't really know where I'm going here, but I think a college education is always a good thing. If nothing else, it shows you can stick with something for four years. On the other hand, I also feel there's no substitute for practical field experience. There is a lot of stuff you can't learn in books and can only be taught by getting your hands dirty. If you have the opportunity to do both, which some people don't, go for it. If not, try and find a good mentor and learn from the best.
M.D. Vaden
vadenphotography.com
I enjoyed reading Arborviews post.
It shows that most any hort degree - forestry, horticulture, landscaping - have so much overlap, that much of the knowledge is transferrable in many facets of the industry.
Also, even if some of us leave horticulture, or a part, we are able to view our natural environment with a much deeper understanding.
Even when I am hiking or camping, the hort training enables me to view my surroundings in a "3-D" way - that's how one post phrased it.
I almost considered attendance hard. Even a push. But maintaining momentum may be a better way to word it.
I was a yo-yo in grade school. Average some years, an "A" student in 6th grade, the a "C" student in middle school, then up to a "B" student in 10th grade, finishing high-school with a 1.3 gpa. I did not know at the ceremony whether I graduated until I was called to get my diploma.
Then the next year, I took 4 classes in college with a friend - phsycology, speech, forget the third, and business management.
I liked the management class - got an "A". I withdrew from the other 3.
Then I wasted my time and money for about years, finally deciding to move back home and pay my way through college while working full time at golf courses.
When someone works and goes to school, its not even an issue for arguements about parents running your life. They can't. Some people get along with thier parents fine. I sort of got along, but as I said, I was usually working or learning. And I got to use the yard as an experimental work area for what I was learning.
It shows that most any hort degree - forestry, horticulture, landscaping - have so much overlap, that much of the knowledge is transferrable in many facets of the industry.
Also, even if some of us leave horticulture, or a part, we are able to view our natural environment with a much deeper understanding.
Even when I am hiking or camping, the hort training enables me to view my surroundings in a "3-D" way - that's how one post phrased it.
I almost considered attendance hard. Even a push. But maintaining momentum may be a better way to word it.
I was a yo-yo in grade school. Average some years, an "A" student in 6th grade, the a "C" student in middle school, then up to a "B" student in 10th grade, finishing high-school with a 1.3 gpa. I did not know at the ceremony whether I graduated until I was called to get my diploma.
Then the next year, I took 4 classes in college with a friend - phsycology, speech, forget the third, and business management.
I liked the management class - got an "A". I withdrew from the other 3.
Then I wasted my time and money for about years, finally deciding to move back home and pay my way through college while working full time at golf courses.
When someone works and goes to school, its not even an issue for arguements about parents running your life. They can't. Some people get along with thier parents fine. I sort of got along, but as I said, I was usually working or learning. And I got to use the yard as an experimental work area for what I was learning.
Froggy
ArboristSite Operative
Reply
TREETX->I really don't think I deservied all that. I was just wondering what others thought. I know it's the tree care industry. Not just climbing. I know an education can be valuable to those who gather all the information and use in to better them selves. If I miss spell something it dosen't mean I'm ignorant and can't comprehend. Some of us really just don't have the money or time to afford college and others of us just couldn't do college. Too hard. An ISA certification is very valuable. When you can build up the experiance and know how to do it. Also the knowledge of trees is important. Understanding what,why, and how. You also need to be able to climb excellent and rigg. You need to know how different species of tree will react to different cuts, different types of pressure each cut will put on the tree, which way the piece will go when you cut it, what's the quickest,effecient, and safest way to set up rigging, your tie in point,etc. I could go on and on. You can learn all this in the field with out school or with the combination of school and experiance. Just because I didn't go to college dosen't mean I'm any less capable of doing my job or just because you went to college dosen't make you any more or less capable of doing your job. We all have to learn one way or another. Maybe tree work will be the only thing I ever succed at, but I'll be satisfied to have a full understanding of trees and be the best all around climber I can be. I've got a great teacher who will teach me to the best of his knowledge and drive me to be the best I can possiably be. I do ask for advice on this form and ask questions. It's the only way I can talk to climber's and tree workers from all around. TREETX, it's really not your place to judge me. I admire all I've heard of you from this form and I hope you keep doing an excellent job in life and you job. Thanks,BB
TREETX->I really don't think I deservied all that. I was just wondering what others thought. I know it's the tree care industry. Not just climbing. I know an education can be valuable to those who gather all the information and use in to better them selves. If I miss spell something it dosen't mean I'm ignorant and can't comprehend. Some of us really just don't have the money or time to afford college and others of us just couldn't do college. Too hard. An ISA certification is very valuable. When you can build up the experiance and know how to do it. Also the knowledge of trees is important. Understanding what,why, and how. You also need to be able to climb excellent and rigg. You need to know how different species of tree will react to different cuts, different types of pressure each cut will put on the tree, which way the piece will go when you cut it, what's the quickest,effecient, and safest way to set up rigging, your tie in point,etc. I could go on and on. You can learn all this in the field with out school or with the combination of school and experiance. Just because I didn't go to college dosen't mean I'm any less capable of doing my job or just because you went to college dosen't make you any more or less capable of doing your job. We all have to learn one way or another. Maybe tree work will be the only thing I ever succed at, but I'll be satisfied to have a full understanding of trees and be the best all around climber I can be. I've got a great teacher who will teach me to the best of his knowledge and drive me to be the best I can possiably be. I do ask for advice on this form and ask questions. It's the only way I can talk to climber's and tree workers from all around. TREETX, it's really not your place to judge me. I admire all I've heard of you from this form and I hope you keep doing an excellent job in life and you job. Thanks,BB
Bob Wulkowicz
ArboristSite Operative
<i>Tree work is what I love and climbing is my passion.</i>
Passion is the secret. Education gives us facts and references. Passion is the energy to do something with anything available, even education.
Bob Wulkowicz
Passion is the secret. Education gives us facts and references. Passion is the energy to do something with anything available, even education.
Bob Wulkowicz
Facts are debatable though.
Science has become a translation employing the tools of deception. Education may not incubate the truth - ask any Indian about anthropology. Ask any cancer patient about Monsanto.
I think about cirriculum - text books selected that reflect an opinion, a business interest, or a religious dictate. Degrees awarded signifying advancement and achievement from parochial institutions instead suppress the truth, reverse the facts, and fog conclusions. Education may indeed be an impediment in some cases - I see oak wilt treatments, ecological science, and allergy medications in this context.
"My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance
but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable
to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent
than college professors".
From my wife's good friend Maya Angelou.
Science has become a translation employing the tools of deception. Education may not incubate the truth - ask any Indian about anthropology. Ask any cancer patient about Monsanto.
I think about cirriculum - text books selected that reflect an opinion, a business interest, or a religious dictate. Degrees awarded signifying advancement and achievement from parochial institutions instead suppress the truth, reverse the facts, and fog conclusions. Education may indeed be an impediment in some cases - I see oak wilt treatments, ecological science, and allergy medications in this context.
"My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance
but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable
to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent
than college professors".
From my wife's good friend Maya Angelou.
Froggy
ArboristSite Operative
Reply
TREETX->Appreciate the apology!!
No hard feelings. I'm sure we probably can learn alot from one another.
Thanks,BB
TREETX->Appreciate the apology!!
No hard feelings. I'm sure we probably can learn alot from one another.Thanks,BB
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