Time Traveler Extraordinaire (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
solaciolum) wrote2010-09-09 12:44 am
solaciolum) wrote2010-09-09 12:44 am
Entry tags:
the stars, the moon, they have all been blown out
In the interest of not losing the ability to count the number of times I have been literally blinded by rage on one hand, I am going to swear off watching televised news programs for...eh, lets give it until the end of the year, I think. Not that I watch the news terribly often anyway; when I need to partake of mainstream media news sources, I go to nytimes.com, and even that doesn't happen with great frequency.
I'm taking a journalism class on portrayals of Islam in the media; unlike my goddamn required survey course, this class is not going to be a waste of my time, which is tremendously exciting for me. We spent an hour in class discussing the Park 51 controversy; for a class of nearly thirty, it was a remarkably good discussion. However, I seem to have developed a reflexive eye-twitch whenever I hear the phrase "Ground Zero Mosque." Another good reason to not watch the news on TV, I suppose.
(I may have to recant my opinion that larger classes can't be treated like seminars; when you hit upon the right combination of engaged and informed students, a professor with strong public speaking skills, and a classroom that gives everyone enough space to speak and be heard, you can get good, productive discussion out of large groups. This does not mean, however, that my fucking school should be forgiven for forcing professors to overload their classes because of budget cuts.)
As far as my useless survey course goes (it's titled "Introduction to the Modern Middle East," but we are beginning with the Persian Empire and making our way forward from there), today we spent an inordinate amount of time listening to the professor explain the roundness of the world. If you're standing in China, the "Middle East" is somewhere in the vicinity of California! If you're in New York, it's somewhere in Europe! There is, of course, something useful to be gotten from interrogating the term "Middle East" and why it is problematic and carries connotations of colonial imperialism. But. We went over this last class. There was no need to further belabor the point.
The professor then took a tangential jaunt into the Renaissance to call Marco Polo a pathological liar and imply that he never traveled anywhere. Now, Marco Polo is emphatically not my homeboy, but still. "Citation needed," as they say in wiki-land.
My notes for this class are kind of amazing, if not terribly useful as notes, per se. I am my own one-person discussion group sometimes. Normally I would do all of my ranting online, but laptops and other electronic devices are forbidden in class unless you bring in a note from a doctor or a dean. (Makes me feel like I'm in high school! >_<) I may need a separate notebook for this class alone, considering the sheer volume of scribbling I produced today.
My Arabic class continues to improve; my Persian class remains amazing, although I still need to sit down and do some hardcore review to get properly back up to speed. Need to come up with better strategies for learning vocabulary, too, since that's going to be a big part of this year. I need to find better study strategies in general, really; I think I may need to start experimenting with caffeine to see if that helps me focus a little better. Clearly, making to do lists and trying to schedule my time better don't actually help.
For most of my life (but not all of it; I don't think I really started having this problem until I was fifteen, which is also when I was being medicated for anxiety), my intense fear of handing in late assignments has always kicked in to override my fear of actually doing the assignments- I've always been less likely to get work done on time for teachers that I like and feel comfortable with, ironically enough. But that hasn't really been cutting it lately, and I don't have the stamina to pull off great feats of sleep deprivation anymore. Part of me doesn't really want to view this as a problem- it's just a side effect of my inherent laziness and tendency to procrastinate, and if I just try harder, it will fix itself. But I've been telling myself this for years, and things have only gotten incrementally worse as time has gone by. :\
I'm taking a journalism class on portrayals of Islam in the media; unlike my goddamn required survey course, this class is not going to be a waste of my time, which is tremendously exciting for me. We spent an hour in class discussing the Park 51 controversy; for a class of nearly thirty, it was a remarkably good discussion. However, I seem to have developed a reflexive eye-twitch whenever I hear the phrase "Ground Zero Mosque." Another good reason to not watch the news on TV, I suppose.
(I may have to recant my opinion that larger classes can't be treated like seminars; when you hit upon the right combination of engaged and informed students, a professor with strong public speaking skills, and a classroom that gives everyone enough space to speak and be heard, you can get good, productive discussion out of large groups. This does not mean, however, that my fucking school should be forgiven for forcing professors to overload their classes because of budget cuts.)
As far as my useless survey course goes (it's titled "Introduction to the Modern Middle East," but we are beginning with the Persian Empire and making our way forward from there), today we spent an inordinate amount of time listening to the professor explain the roundness of the world. If you're standing in China, the "Middle East" is somewhere in the vicinity of California! If you're in New York, it's somewhere in Europe! There is, of course, something useful to be gotten from interrogating the term "Middle East" and why it is problematic and carries connotations of colonial imperialism. But. We went over this last class. There was no need to further belabor the point.
The professor then took a tangential jaunt into the Renaissance to call Marco Polo a pathological liar and imply that he never traveled anywhere. Now, Marco Polo is emphatically not my homeboy, but still. "Citation needed," as they say in wiki-land.
My notes for this class are kind of amazing, if not terribly useful as notes, per se. I am my own one-person discussion group sometimes. Normally I would do all of my ranting online, but laptops and other electronic devices are forbidden in class unless you bring in a note from a doctor or a dean. (Makes me feel like I'm in high school! >_<) I may need a separate notebook for this class alone, considering the sheer volume of scribbling I produced today.
My Arabic class continues to improve; my Persian class remains amazing, although I still need to sit down and do some hardcore review to get properly back up to speed. Need to come up with better strategies for learning vocabulary, too, since that's going to be a big part of this year. I need to find better study strategies in general, really; I think I may need to start experimenting with caffeine to see if that helps me focus a little better. Clearly, making to do lists and trying to schedule my time better don't actually help.
For most of my life (but not all of it; I don't think I really started having this problem until I was fifteen, which is also when I was being medicated for anxiety), my intense fear of handing in late assignments has always kicked in to override my fear of actually doing the assignments- I've always been less likely to get work done on time for teachers that I like and feel comfortable with, ironically enough. But that hasn't really been cutting it lately, and I don't have the stamina to pull off great feats of sleep deprivation anymore. Part of me doesn't really want to view this as a problem- it's just a side effect of my inherent laziness and tendency to procrastinate, and if I just try harder, it will fix itself. But I've been telling myself this for years, and things have only gotten incrementally worse as time has gone by. :\