The Road Not Taken to Hell is Paved With Pretensions

[matt_rah]

There have been three main threads I've pursued in my academic career: math, music, and (French) literature. Of these, the third is the one where I met with the greatest success-highest GPA, best relationships with professors, honors thesis, etc. However, I never had any interest in pursuing a graduate degree in French literature (or comparative

Comments

[funwithrage]

Interesting.

I mean, granted, I don't have a grad student perspective on this. At an undergrad level, though...yeah. I'd say that at least eighty percent of my English courses were pure bullshit. At Brown, this had something to do with jargon, but really more with the insistence that everything must be socially significant; thus, instead of learning how a story achieved its effect or even analyzing the in-text themes, we dedicated hours upon tedious hours to the proposition that women and minorities had been oppressed.

Gasp. Shock.

Brown, now that I think about it, had the opposite problem from Yale in a lot of ways. Instead of being disconnected from the real world, our professors seemed totally unable, with the exception of Russom and a few others, to analyze a text *as a text*, and not as an insight into pre-feminist post-modernist blah blah political awarenesscakes.

Now that I'm out of college, it's amazing how much I enjoy learning new things--even reading critical essays--and I wonder if, in college, the fact that I had no time for analysis was due to academic burnout or just that the analysis was presented badly.

Also, I'm of the somewhat-against-the-grain opinion that there should be fewer opportunities for undergrads to talk. I pretty much always liked lectures better than discussions in college; there were few things I cared about less than what my peers thought.

[matt_rah]

>>Also, I'm of the somewhat-against-the-grain opinion that there should be fewer opportunities for undergrads to talk. <<

Maybe in English classes... not in math or science classes though, which IME would generally benefit from more interactivity.

Matt

[instigator_ash]

Seconded. In computer science, the naturally-thinking-like-a-computer students and TAs were generally MUCH better at verbalizing the concepts than about half the faculty. Also the top 10% of the class tended to be wrong less than some of my professors. *has happy memories of scoring 150% on a test because it had so many defective questions*

[funwithrage]

Hm.

I wonder--given that I have, admittedly, only ever taken one college-level math or science course--if part of that could be because of their greater objectivity? People discussing things in a math and science course seem more likely to have to base their questions/theories on *something*, whereas an English class discussion tends to be very much opinion-based.

This could also be a matter of Izzy's Staggering Contempt for Humanity. I want to know what my professor thinks, because he has credentials and stuff; I care what my friends think, because they're my friends for reasons, one of which is intelligence; my random-English-class peers are nineteen, and probably dumb, and the time when they're talking is a great time to write game notes.

[matt_rah]

The objectivity thing is definitely part of it. Let me say as a bit of an aside, I found that the culture in some math classes was so staggeringly anti-student-participation that I felt like a pariah for raising my hand to ask questions, even when I genuinely didn't get stuff. Obviously, there's a line between legitimately asking questions and slowing down the class when you should in fact be going to office hours to get individual attention, but I don't feel I crossed it very often if at all. And my point is that being in an environment where active questioning is actually *discouraged* is totally poisonous, at least for me. It's certainly part of the slew of complaints I have against the Math Department.

That said, humanities class discussions could be more productive, if there were some actual goal in mind other than intellectual wanking. Like, prepare a speech or poster presentation to the class on... I don't know, the latest chapter in whatever book you're reading, and be prepared to defend it logically. Unfortunately, IME (and, uh, IYE), most such discussions just go on endlessly in circles, and it takes an extraordinarily skilled professor to make sure the spiral isn't downwards.

(This is place on the Venn diagram of my opinions and yours where they actually intersect.)

Matt

[mazarin]

Could you give some details on what you mean about "anti-student participation"? In my experience, at Brown and elsewhere, the usual problem is that students are too afraid to ask questions rather than because the professor creates an atmosphere which discourages questions.

This probably has more to do with the presence of other students in class than it has to do with the professor. Asking questions in a technical field tells everyone that there is some (typically) basic fact you don't know, where in things like lit theory or MCM, questions are supposedly indicative of clever insights which attack the established dogma.

Try and imagine someone in Baker's MU55 asking what major or minor scales are.

[matt_rah]

Oh, that feeling definitely had a lot to do with the other students as much as it did with the professor.

As for asking about basic facts-well, I think that's when you cross the line into "needs to go to office hours." But it shouldn't be frowned upon to ask questions about the new material that is currently being introduced... right?

Matt

[mazarin]

You might have missed what I was saying. I think it's actually good to ask basic questions in class. Most of the time other people are wondering the same thing but too afraid to ask.

However, the inhibition from the psychological-game-side of things is that you are demonstrating a weakness in your knowledge by doing so, and if you are of a competitive mindset and treat class as a status game, then this will stop you from asking.

On an aside, there actually is a wrong way to ask about new material as well. Again, you can imagine someone asking about German chords but in a way which reveals that he knows nothing about the distinction between major and minor. To link with the stuff above, people tend to ask advanced questions when the source of confusion owes itself to a more simple question. But of course it would be embarrassing to ask a simple question.