Fencer occupations?

[D'Artagnan1673]

Perhaps that is why more Engineers, IT Proffesionals and Doctors fence and not as many Humanities people fence. I find, lovingly, that humanities people do not often have a great deal of logic.

[Peach]

Talk about your vast overgeneralizations.

[D'Artagnan1673]

......

[thebigriddle]

It may also be the fact that it is very competitive, I have a lot of kids from a lot of different majors who take my class, the one that stick with it, are the science and math people. I think some people think fencing is just an art. I have had some dance majors and threater arts majors and their responce is fencing is so graceful. There is creativity to it, however, the rules have to be followed so there is a logic to it. I am not saying a person who is humanities person can't fence well, I am just saying from what my observations over several years has been. I always like the students who say I am not very competitive, of course then why are you learning how to fence.

[135711]

no, doctors have eveyone by the nuts, and they know it. they make the most money except for lawyers, but lawyers have to be in court all day, doctors can go on conferences to geneva for "updating" on a local mosquito, or they can close their office to fly to wherever for a compeition, after a while, a broken foil is a broken heart, a good one costs a fortune, they need constant repair and to fence a lot of compeition you need a lot of foils, being a doctor allows you freedom to move about and a healthy budget. i don't care for the deal that much but there you have it. for a long time, i think we've bought into the notion of the scientific 'mind' being better tuned to fencing, but i really don't see it that way at all. it's always been more difficult to make money in the arts, the greatest artists have starved to death, just trying to sell one canvas. good artists are very intelligent, and think as clearly as a scientist, some better. a hang up for a lot of us in the middle, earning between 30-38,000 a year, have to answer to employers and find it difficult to schedule time off; then you have to have the cooperation of your salle, and the people there have to be very interested in competitions and organizing them.

[Tim McMackin]

When I joined my college's club, I was the only member (of the 10) who was not a classical languages major. And I had taken 4 years of Latin in high school. While the tae kwon do club was counting jumping jacks in some Asian language, we'd count exercises in Latin.

Classical sport, classical minds, I guess. Five years later and the club is still largely Latin-Greek majors, I'm told.

[Triton]

The high school club I teach is composed of nearly equal numbers of boys and girls, from freshmen through seniors, and even an eighth grader and a graduate or two. The interesting statistic is which other sports or extra-curriculars they also belong to.

There are no fencers in the club who play any of the other sports offered at the school. One girl was on the volleyball team for several years, but didn't make it this year. (They said she wasn't aggressive enough!) Some of the others have taken various martial arts outside of school. We have about 3-4 members of the school band, about the same number of drama club members, but the largest cross-over category is from the Creative Writers Union. This is a group that meets every week to share their poetry and short stories with each other and drink copious amounts of coffee. They make up almost half our fencing club, including myself.

Poetry in motion, I guess...

[Peach]

This weekend in Columbus, a friend asked me how many college degrees I had. I had to think a minute, then started counting on my fingers, and he started laughing. "That's what everybody here does when I ask them that," he said.