Funny thing: the word "school" is actually the ancient Greek word for leisure. The idea was, if you had the means to live a life of leisure, then of course you

Funny thing: the word "school" is actually the ancient Greek word for leisure. The idea was, if you had the means to live a life of leisure, then of course you'd spend it learning and talking about cool stuff with other similarly well-off people. Somewhere along the way, they turned school into just another form of work. Unlike regular work, it doesn't produce anything. It has all the stress and unpleasantness of regular work (more, even), except you can't use the most efficient method to get it done (that would be delegating the work to someone who likes it), and it consumes time and other resources without yielding benefits. The theory is that learning happens as a side-effect, but the reality is, it doesn't. Seriously, if you wanted to set up a business to help people learn subjects to a high level of mastery, you wouldn't do it anything like a (modern) college. I wonder, though, if professors live (or at least can live) the kind of life we want: they are basically paid to indulge their curiosity, and their only measurable obligation is that they have to teach some classes. If you're a cool professor, you might even find a way to make the classes worthwhile. This is the route I've just started on. I'm now in my first semester of grad school. I'm hoping to treat the experience as "school" in the ancient sense of the word. In six or seven years, I plan to get a tenure-track job, indulging my curiosity. I figure since that's play-time for me, I should be great at it and enjoy it. Results so far: terrible. Taking three grad-level classes at once (and teaching one class) chewed up so much time, I had almost no time to think or learn or sleep. Complicating factor: I had a headache that lasted six weeks, and I started the semester exhausted. Mid-semester, I was so exhausted, I took a three-week break from homework. I got my ability to think back, but I spent the rest of the semester hustling to catch up. Plan for next semester: Get a lot of rest over the break, and put all the creativity I can into finishing each day's "work" by 5:30 p.m. so I can follow my whims in the evening. If that doesn't work, then I'll quit. Or maybe not. I just can't see getting a regular software job again. I've done that cycle of working hard and enjoying it the first several months or a year, and then getting sick of it and barely showing up. I think I am completely burnt out on just getting coding done. I am particularly sick of debugging. Oh, damn, that reminds me, I have to debug some Scheme code for one of those classes.