Three Little Birds (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mistersandman) wrote2011-01-06 07:53 pm
mistersandman) wrote2011-01-06 07:53 pm
New Facebook Justifies My Loathing: How a Status Becomes a Rant
I wanted to vent a little frustration on my facebook by writing a slightly exasperated status regarding my schedule this semester. But of course, facebook provided the rantbait: "Status updates must be less than 420 characters. You have entered 505 characters here. Notes can be much longer. Would you like to edit and post your update as a Note instead?"
DON'T MIND IF I DO.
As a History major at Pitt, I was informed *very* early on that I would have to take a Writing Seminar for Majors, which was described to me as a class where students developed a long scholarly work on a subject that was of interest to them. Although I was yet to discover any subject that was of particular interest to me, the idea that one day I would write something akin to a thesis as an undergraduate was pretty appealing to me. As you are probably aware, the years went by and I became rather fascinated with Chinese history, particularly that of the first half of the twentieth century.
I spent the better part of my academic career preparing myself for such a great work, even scouring used bookstores for first-hand accounts of this period. ((I would link you to my post om His Honor Lt. Col. PT Etherton's book "The Crisis in China" if the Internet hadn't gobbled it up))
But as I discovered today, that was pretty much the worst way I could have spent my idle hours during my college career. Indeed, writing seminars are just like any other class where you write a 20 page essay, only with less freedom to choose your topic. Not only that, but the particular writing seminar that I have enrolled in under the pretense that it was Asian Studies has very little to do with Asia at all!
It is, in fact, a course in which we chronicle American wilderness preservation movements with a couple of short papers not over three pages double-spaced and then one large paper, which is twenty pages long.
Okay, boo hoo. I didn't get the chance to show the world what a colossal nerd I am. Wilderness preservation is arguably more important and more interesting to more people than how VK Wellington Koo's identity issues shaped the flow of history.
The fact remains that this is just another final disappointment in a long string of disappointments that the University of Pittsburgh glibly foisted as an Academic Program. I, youthful and grinning, happily accepted what I believed to be a generous offer and then proceeded to be whipped by this mighty chain of disappointment for three years. I cannot think of a single semester where I didn't have to sit through at least one class that was not a total intellectual joke on my person.
Possibly the greatest--and most frequent insults were the times when I was proffered a class that sounded very interesting in the class description but delivered embarrassingly low returns. Notable misfires include a class advertised to explore the evolution of pop culture through Chinese history, but wound up being composed mostly of incredibly tedious lectures on Ming dynasty pornography. A recent favorite was the East Asian Buddhism class that managed to transform a historical narrative fraught with irony, political intrigue and betrayal into a tedious prolonged fairy tale.
This is clearly a subject I feel strongly about. I could write whole pages on the time they called in a monkey vagina expert for an otherwise respectable Anthropology class or the semester where I was forced to watch an elderly couple bicker their way through a three and a half hour class they co-taught every week.
Do you want to get me started on the way language classes are handled?
You do not want me to get started on the way language classes are handled.
It hasn't all been bad. There are some incredibly intelligent and notable professors at Pitt. I've even had a few of them and I certainly learned a lot. Does that mean I will extract an ounce of pride from the diploma I receive in April? Does it mean that the University of Pittsburgh will see so much as a penny from me in my later years?
...
DON'T MIND IF I DO.
As a History major at Pitt, I was informed *very* early on that I would have to take a Writing Seminar for Majors, which was described to me as a class where students developed a long scholarly work on a subject that was of interest to them. Although I was yet to discover any subject that was of particular interest to me, the idea that one day I would write something akin to a thesis as an undergraduate was pretty appealing to me. As you are probably aware, the years went by and I became rather fascinated with Chinese history, particularly that of the first half of the twentieth century.
I spent the better part of my academic career preparing myself for such a great work, even scouring used bookstores for first-hand accounts of this period. ((I would link you to my post om His Honor Lt. Col. PT Etherton's book "The Crisis in China" if the Internet hadn't gobbled it up))
But as I discovered today, that was pretty much the worst way I could have spent my idle hours during my college career. Indeed, writing seminars are just like any other class where you write a 20 page essay, only with less freedom to choose your topic. Not only that, but the particular writing seminar that I have enrolled in under the pretense that it was Asian Studies has very little to do with Asia at all!
It is, in fact, a course in which we chronicle American wilderness preservation movements with a couple of short papers not over three pages double-spaced and then one large paper, which is twenty pages long.
Okay, boo hoo. I didn't get the chance to show the world what a colossal nerd I am. Wilderness preservation is arguably more important and more interesting to more people than how VK Wellington Koo's identity issues shaped the flow of history.
The fact remains that this is just another final disappointment in a long string of disappointments that the University of Pittsburgh glibly foisted as an Academic Program. I, youthful and grinning, happily accepted what I believed to be a generous offer and then proceeded to be whipped by this mighty chain of disappointment for three years. I cannot think of a single semester where I didn't have to sit through at least one class that was not a total intellectual joke on my person.
Possibly the greatest--and most frequent insults were the times when I was proffered a class that sounded very interesting in the class description but delivered embarrassingly low returns. Notable misfires include a class advertised to explore the evolution of pop culture through Chinese history, but wound up being composed mostly of incredibly tedious lectures on Ming dynasty pornography. A recent favorite was the East Asian Buddhism class that managed to transform a historical narrative fraught with irony, political intrigue and betrayal into a tedious prolonged fairy tale.
This is clearly a subject I feel strongly about. I could write whole pages on the time they called in a monkey vagina expert for an otherwise respectable Anthropology class or the semester where I was forced to watch an elderly couple bicker their way through a three and a half hour class they co-taught every week.
Do you want to get me started on the way language classes are handled?
You do not want me to get started on the way language classes are handled.
It hasn't all been bad. There are some incredibly intelligent and notable professors at Pitt. I've even had a few of them and I certainly learned a lot. Does that mean I will extract an ounce of pride from the diploma I receive in April? Does it mean that the University of Pittsburgh will see so much as a penny from me in my later years?
...