“LIVE AND LEARN”

HONORS CONVOCATION SPEECH

Honors Day APRIL 21, 2002

By Dr. Marian Smith

Thank you, David.

I wish all of you—faculty, students and guests—a good afternoon, and to this group of outstanding scholars, I extend my congratulations. I am honored to have been invited to address you at this important event, during which the entire community celebrates your academic success. You surely must be feeling the exhilaration of having achieved an important goal and you should be basking in a righteous sense of accomplishment. It is a time for celebration and reflection—a time to rest upon your laurels for a moment and to assess the strategies that brought you to this point in your life. No doubt about it, you’ve done well.

I would like to suggest, that it is also a time to start planning for the next step in your educational experience: I’m talking about “the rest of your life.”

I am not the first person, of course, who’s thought about living and learning. “Hmmm,” you might ask, “How can one live and not learn?” Undoubtedly, living always involves some learning; however, opinions vary on our ability to learn something useful as we live. Cervantes, in Don Quixote, takes an upbeat view... “It is good to live and learn,” he says, but, about 100 years later, John Pomfret a dour Englishman groused “We live and learn, but not the wiser grow.” It is up to us to decide which viewpoint will shape our lives.

If you’re a “non-traditional” student...a term often applied to scholars who take an indirect or interrupted route through academia, you may believe that I’m only talking to students who have the majority of their lives ahead of them. Please don’t doze off yet—you may find that my slow, winding path through academia is similar to your own.

My higher education was completed entirely within state university systems—a small college in Texas, a smaller university in Oklahoma, and finally, a large university in Kansas. Although there were no prestigious halls of the Ivy League for me, my education has been a solid foundation on which to build...however slowly.

I began preparation for my botanical career when I was a grandmother of 42. A few weeks ago, Professor James Trent, in his address at the Paul Simon Research Scholar Luncheon, confessed that he was a “slow learner”; that twenty or thirty years after “learning” something, he suddenly understood what it meant. I find that I, too, am a slow learner.

Twenty years ago, after wandering around the world with a footloose engineer husband and my family, I returned to the United States to continue my formal education. Our son entered high school, our daughter began an undergraduate program, and I attended my first college botany class. Somehow, twenty years in the international oil fields, where nothing at all grows except steel derricks, convinced me, that given half a chance, I could become a happy...old, but happy...botanist. Needless to say, if I’d stopped learning when I was twenty, the age when I received my baccalaureate degree in math, I’d still be old, but I wouldn’t be a botanist, and I wouldn’t be here today.

At SIUE, one of our most sacred beliefs is that our primary task is to help you learn how to learn—and how to keep on applying that knowledge throughout your lifetime. I teach botany, the study of plants, and think...perhaps irrationally...that learning the parts of a flower should probably come, in our educational paradigm, right after “reading, writing and arithmetic”—or maybe even before reading, writing and arithmetic.

Rationally, however, I know that at the top of the list of critical things we want for you take into your future will not be the biochemical pathways of photosynthesis (lovely as they are), or the date that Britain was last invaded (however important to Britons and historians), or who painted the “Irises”, or who wrote “The Ancient Mariner,” or who composed “Swan Lake.” Although these bits of knowledge are fascinating and might serve you well on a TV quiz show, they will probably not prepare you for life.

So...what things are really important?

First, I believe I’d have to list the love of learning—an overweening, abiding curiosity about everything: how things work, why things are, what’s important, what makes life go ‘round. A part of my teaching duty involves being an academic advisor in biology. As such, I often talk with students who have a very focused view of their future: they want to be doctors, dentists, medical technologists, wildlife biologists, and, occasionally botanists. Although these goals are worthy, they are very narrow in scope and offer a future—that however commendable—may not fit their needs later in life. Fortunately, our General Education program requires students to take an expanded view of the universe, and to learn things of value about a wide variety disciplines.

Some of the most rewarding moments of my advising career occur when students return for enrollment a subsequent semester and say, “Thanks for recommending that theater class; I loved it,” “I really enjoyed my anthropology class” or the “English class you recommended has improved my ability to write immensely.” You may find, that like Professor Trent and myself, you are slow learners, and a remembered appreciation of a discipline outside your chosen field may blossom into new a career in the future. I and my colleagues are immeasurably strengthened in our resolve to continue teaching and advising if we feel that we have helped ignite a spark of intellectual adventure in each of you. You become an extension of our own lives and learning.

It follows then, that the second and more tangible thing we hope to pass on to you is the ability to find, process and evaluate information. In a time when we suffer from sensory and information overload—facts, fiction, and the patently ridiculous—you, quite literally, need to keep your wits about you. Although the content, context, and quality of this glut of information will undoubtedly change daily, having learned... how to make decisions based on logical processes, how to read and listen with discrimination, how to value and appreciate beauty and how to identify the ethical and philosophical principles of your daily situation will enable you to “live and learn” and the Wiser Grow! It’s apparent that John Pomfret--poor, disillusioned man--did not have the advantage of an SIUE education!

The last thing that I’ll speak of today is our hope that we have passed on to you confidence...the confidence in your own ability to grow intellectually every day of the rest of your life. Knowing that you know something and how to use it, provides an infusion of courage and confidence based on your abilities—your ability to learn new ideas and skills, your ability to handle new situations, your ability to engage in social discourse and collaborative efforts, and your ability to adapt to a changing world—free you from the fear of facing new challenges after you leave SIUE. So what if the world no longer needs someone who knows how to make recordings on cassette tape or if computers, as we know them, become obsolete? You will be able to grow and evolve with society and its needs.

Of course, you also know that I’ll be here if you decide to change your career directive from “engineering to botany,” or “business to botany,” or “English literature to botany.” And, just in case you’ve managed to avoid my subtle recruitment into the field of botany, all of my colleagues will be here to help you in the future. Please don’t think of us as just being a part of your past--include us in your future education.

Thank you for your attention and patience this afternoon. I know you’re eager to get on with your lives, and I congratulate you again for your accomplishments. Have a good life-long learning experience and be assured that the best wishes of all of us at SIUE go with you.

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