Excuse me, I have a test to administer

Seriously?  Who has a chalkboard anymore?

So the student in my English class, waiting for me to hand out the final exam, is complaining to fellow students that education is not practical enough.  "Why Shakespeare," he asks?  "Why not teach us how to write a resume?"

I have been thinking lately, again, that my life represents always being on the wrong side of every door.  Self-pity, mostly, but I was qualified intellectually to be a lawyer; I just never had the personality for it (I'm not going into details; take my word for it).  I was a spiritually sound pastor; just not a very good one otherwise.  I'm a terrible administrator, which didn't help me in ministry and wouldn't help me if I ever worked in a hierarchy (academia, e.g.) long enough to need to rise to my level of incompetence.  I fell into teaching, my true "calling," but I'm part-time; I'll never be full-time, much less tenure track.  And I'm prickly enough it should probably stay that way; it's better for me and any organization that I have as little contact with people as possible, mostly because I'm preternatually shy (life has only re-enforced this in me) and that comes across as aloofness or even quiet arrogance.

"I love mankind, it's people I can't stand."

And yet, as Willie the Shake almost said, "by heaven I think my life as rare as any life belied with false compare."

Why Shakespeare, and not resume building?  Because if you can think, you can do anything.  What accomplishments I have are owed to a liberal arts education.  My very first job out of graduate school was with a law firm.  I convinced them I could be a paralegal, even though I had no idea what the job entailed (fortunately, neither did they.  We learned together.)  The degrees I have which fit me for a specific task (my other two degrees are "professional", not academic, though a Ph.D. would be as particular and confining) left me high and dry (see above).  It is my broad academic background (English major, philosophy minor, lots of room in the undergrad requirements to study other fields, so I dabbled in Art History and even Computer Programming, back when that meant keypunch) that has carried me this far.

I could say I wasn't meant to be this way, to live the life I lived; but I was meant to.  Not by fate or doom or preordained cruelty, but because of who I am and what the world is.  So it goes.  But what I have done with what I have, is due to my liberal (in the old sense) education.  I know things; but more importantly, I know how to do things, because I know how to think about things.

I actually spent a short stint, while trying to make my legal career remunerative, writing resumes for people.  It was a mug's game, a matter of salesmanship more than writing ability.  Resumes are useless, anyway.  The best one never got you a job, and the worst one is no less regarded than the best.  Credentials, in the end, are all that matter for most jobs; credentials, or knowing somebody.

So it goes.