John, we may indeed want to agree to disagree, but I am not sure that we
are so far apart.
You quote me, and then counter with the case of your wife:
SE:
>There is also nothing wrong that I can see with being so enamored of art,
>or music, or physics, or carpentry that one wants to become a master
>carpenter or eats,drinks, and sleeps physics or music, and neglects a few
>of the other trades to make room for that mastery.
JG:
>Well, I'm married to one of those people (musician, at the highest level)
>and I see a lot wrong with what she neglected. She doesn't, explicitly,
>see it as being "wrong" but lately she's been talking about wanting
>desperately to experience other aspects of life.
A few comments, John.
First: you may be describing a "workaholic," rather than a specialist.
Work--any work, including writing messages to LO or creating
interdisciplinary courses--can become an addiction, an obsession.
There may be a fine line between the one who works at his trade long hours
because s/he loves it and prefers it to other ways of spending a life, and
one who puts in the same hours because s/he is helpless to stop: a fine
line, but it is there.
And: it does not seem to me that there is any sort of connection between
the disease of addiction to work and "interdisciplinarity" as the cure.
I'd bet that there is no connection between the nature of the college
curriculum and addiction: liberal arts graduates and specialists equally
likely to become drinkers or workaholics.
That is: I don't think you think that the undergraduate who takes a course
that combines freshman comp and chemistry is more or less likely to drink
or work too much.
Or too little.
Steve Eskow
--Steve Eskow <dreskow@corp.webb.net>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>