My Women's Studies Class
Several years ago, when I first started college, I had a music theory class. This class kicked my ass. It also affirmed most of my greatest fears. Always having dealt with school and school work with relative ease, I found myself in the music department struggling to keep up with the rest of the class. I have never thought that I was the brightest, most talented, or most exceptional one in any other class, but I was always comfortable being in the pack--behind some, smarter than most. But when I got to music theory, I was far behind the rest of the pack, and utterly unprepared for what it would take, personally, for me to deal with these sudden new feelings of "not getting it" and figuring out how to make it better. For the whole school year I struggled (with the rest of my incoming class) to make sense of not only the huge influx of new and complicated ideas and information, but also HOW to deal with these sudden feelings of insecurity. I eventually made it through to the mediocre level with my pride and confidence in music relatively intact. I came to appreciate how much I struggled in that class and the professor who kicked my ass. Even in graduate school, I have not had a class that was as hard or taxed me as much as Music Theory 101. But now I am suffering flashbacks.
I have chosen, as the professional interest I am pursuing in graduate school, to study the field of gender, environment and development. In very short and simplistic terms, I want to study how women affect the environment in which they live and how that affects international development policies. To embellish my professional credentials and help me carve out an expertise, I decided to fulfill the requirements for a graduate certificate in the Women's Studies department. I am taking the first class in pursuit of this now and have had 3 meetings so far. I am beginning to worry that it will follow the same path as my music theory class.
This class is heavily steeped in theory--and political feminist theory at that. Though I have never taken any feminist classes before, I thought I would still be able to keep up. The issues we talk about are nothing new--the image of the happy housewife in the 1950's, the Women's Liberation Movement, reproductive rights, female circumcision, etc--yet I feel utterly inadequate in this class. Not all of the women in this class are Women's Studies majors, but all of them have a history of feminist study. They are all very intelligent, eloquent, knowledgeable, well-read women, and usually this does not intimidate me, so why does it now? The reading assignments are dense, but understanable to me. I feel like I understand what the author is saying when I read them, but when I get to class and the rest of the class speaks, I leave thinking I had no clue what I was reading. The other women seem to think about, ruminate, and ingest this stuff on a different level, while I am still grasping the surface. I am still trying to connect the sentences.
I know I have knowledge in other things--other ideas, other fields, other training, and in graduate school that would be acceptable. We are in this class to learn, and if someone from a different field brings a different perspective, then all the better. I think this is really what is frustrating me. I feel like my brain is stunted; like I can't come up with any intelligible ideas to bring to the table, and I am being a bad representative of my anthropological training. Most of the class time is discussion of the texts. The professor goes around the room and collects (verbally) a discussion topic from everyone. I feel like mine have no depth or thought. I have a terrible time drawing ideas, insights, and life from the texts. Everyone seems to have these well thought out, dense, well constructed ideas, and I'm the high school student in the room who's trying to keep up. I feel like I had more feelings than this going through my head in this week's class, but they seemed to have passed like the breeze. I have, though, been continually frustrated with my inability to digest texts and formulate intelligible ideas from them for a long time. This does not express itself so much in my anthropology classes, because I have the ability to hide a lot easier, and since I have formed great friendships with the people I participate with, I do not suffer the insecurity. My women's studies class, however, exposes me in a way that I have often avoided, but long known I've needed. I wish I could relish and embrace that opportunity to grow rather than shrink in fear from it, and carve out the foothold I need.
I wrote this out here, because I know myself well enough to know, that if I write it out or explain it to someone it will begin to look overly dramatic to me. I will see my mountain of a mole-hill. I have been quite lucky in my life to be able to have great confidence and comfortability in myself most of the time, so when something trying as this comes up, I have to fight my flight instinct. I know I will figure this out and it will eventually be fine, but it just needed a voice, I guess.
I have chosen, as the professional interest I am pursuing in graduate school, to study the field of gender, environment and development. In very short and simplistic terms, I want to study how women affect the environment in which they live and how that affects international development policies. To embellish my professional credentials and help me carve out an expertise, I decided to fulfill the requirements for a graduate certificate in the Women's Studies department. I am taking the first class in pursuit of this now and have had 3 meetings so far. I am beginning to worry that it will follow the same path as my music theory class.
This class is heavily steeped in theory--and political feminist theory at that. Though I have never taken any feminist classes before, I thought I would still be able to keep up. The issues we talk about are nothing new--the image of the happy housewife in the 1950's, the Women's Liberation Movement, reproductive rights, female circumcision, etc--yet I feel utterly inadequate in this class. Not all of the women in this class are Women's Studies majors, but all of them have a history of feminist study. They are all very intelligent, eloquent, knowledgeable, well-read women, and usually this does not intimidate me, so why does it now? The reading assignments are dense, but understanable to me. I feel like I understand what the author is saying when I read them, but when I get to class and the rest of the class speaks, I leave thinking I had no clue what I was reading. The other women seem to think about, ruminate, and ingest this stuff on a different level, while I am still grasping the surface. I am still trying to connect the sentences.
I know I have knowledge in other things--other ideas, other fields, other training, and in graduate school that would be acceptable. We are in this class to learn, and if someone from a different field brings a different perspective, then all the better. I think this is really what is frustrating me. I feel like my brain is stunted; like I can't come up with any intelligible ideas to bring to the table, and I am being a bad representative of my anthropological training. Most of the class time is discussion of the texts. The professor goes around the room and collects (verbally) a discussion topic from everyone. I feel like mine have no depth or thought. I have a terrible time drawing ideas, insights, and life from the texts. Everyone seems to have these well thought out, dense, well constructed ideas, and I'm the high school student in the room who's trying to keep up. I feel like I had more feelings than this going through my head in this week's class, but they seemed to have passed like the breeze. I have, though, been continually frustrated with my inability to digest texts and formulate intelligible ideas from them for a long time. This does not express itself so much in my anthropology classes, because I have the ability to hide a lot easier, and since I have formed great friendships with the people I participate with, I do not suffer the insecurity. My women's studies class, however, exposes me in a way that I have often avoided, but long known I've needed. I wish I could relish and embrace that opportunity to grow rather than shrink in fear from it, and carve out the foothold I need.
I wrote this out here, because I know myself well enough to know, that if I write it out or explain it to someone it will begin to look overly dramatic to me. I will see my mountain of a mole-hill. I have been quite lucky in my life to be able to have great confidence and comfortability in myself most of the time, so when something trying as this comes up, I have to fight my flight instinct. I know I will figure this out and it will eventually be fine, but it just needed a voice, I guess.