"life experience" — i.e., "time spent in involuntary biological persistence"
This from blog "The War on Mediocrity" at http://colinmarshall.livejournal.com/.
Monday, December 14, 2009
Tuesday, December 08, 2009
Funny, Life
So I have rehearsal every night this week, occasionally two at once, and my assessment starts being due at the end of the week. Feel relatively good about my "All environmental issues are political: discuss". I waffle on about Foucault which is great fun, but I still need to get examples and for examples I need to do more research. I wrote a serviceable introduction today for the essay on why geographers should read Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, a book about the gentrification of Times Square/how the author likes to suck homeless people off in porn theatres. I really disliked the author and writing style, but it was certainly the most unusal book I've been assigned here. The third essay, on AIDS, I've yet to start. It just feels too broad: we have a few pages of obvious, non-related statistics, and using them and outside research are meant to link poverty, prostitution, education, and orphanhood in the context of AIDS to sustainable development in Nigeria.
Rehearsals have been going *okay*. I am feeling really disillusioned with acting, as if it was some sort of training or skill-building that was incredibly relevant for my high school life but whose importance lessens with every year that goes by. I don't know if I want to audition for stuff next semester, but have a fear that if I don't I will be casting about aimlessly with ways to fill my non-academic time.
This all sounds terribly mopey, but it isn't really. I am enjoying this time, learning and just thinking a lot. Have started thinking about the future a wee bit, weird as that is. Want to do more with Spanish, I suppose as its one of the few practical real-world 'skills' that 14 years of education has given me. I realise that I think a lot about/in terms of the summer between first and second year in Costa Rica because of language development and manual labour. I'm interested in exploring the WWOOF-ing network, which is sort of like couchsurfing but is specifically for farms. The idea is that you join the site for a small fee (for a year), and then travel around approved farms wherever you like, doing work in exchange for a bed and food. If I want to be back in Scotland for the Fringe, WWOOF-ing around England/Spain could be a cool way to spend a month of summer. All just thoughts though.
Rehearsals have been going *okay*. I am feeling really disillusioned with acting, as if it was some sort of training or skill-building that was incredibly relevant for my high school life but whose importance lessens with every year that goes by. I don't know if I want to audition for stuff next semester, but have a fear that if I don't I will be casting about aimlessly with ways to fill my non-academic time.
This all sounds terribly mopey, but it isn't really. I am enjoying this time, learning and just thinking a lot. Have started thinking about the future a wee bit, weird as that is. Want to do more with Spanish, I suppose as its one of the few practical real-world 'skills' that 14 years of education has given me. I realise that I think a lot about/in terms of the summer between first and second year in Costa Rica because of language development and manual labour. I'm interested in exploring the WWOOF-ing network, which is sort of like couchsurfing but is specifically for farms. The idea is that you join the site for a small fee (for a year), and then travel around approved farms wherever you like, doing work in exchange for a bed and food. If I want to be back in Scotland for the Fringe, WWOOF-ing around England/Spain could be a cool way to spend a month of summer. All just thoughts though.
Tuesday, December 01, 2009
Like, regular updates? OMG
Saved! Discovered I hadn't been looking at the first week of December when seeing what I need to do for essays, so I have a full week more than I thought I did! I can use this time to do stuff like actually doing research and writing credible academic essays rather than waffling soggily. So that's fun. I have actually regained a lot of my drive and am doing lots of reading, which is cool. I do think I have a chip on my shoulder in the stuff that St Andrews asks us to do, and it's this: we are asked to produce academic material.
That's all. Now, Brian, you say, this is great! This is what you should be doing in university! Universities in the US would kill to have every sentence properly cited and referenced, this is why British universities seem competitive for students, the standard of work that they put out is often academically better because of research and reproduction. Here's the problem with this model: it is just reproduction. A focus on brevity is fantastic, a focus on correct research is great. But put the two together and you end up producing a lot of well-cited parroting of everything that has come before. Even this is not a bad thing, except for the fact that it encourages students to read and unquestioningly accept arguments--or, if they don't accept them, to argue them *in the terms* already laid out for them. US institutions maybe focus too much on the touchy-feely "how does this relate to you and make you feel" of their subjects (I wouldn't know), but here I am beginning to feel that the lack of discussion in classrooms is partly from a lack of critical engagement with the material, 'engagement' and not 'critical' being the operative word. Only in Urban Cultural Geography do people really speak up in lectures, and that's because the professor makes words his statements in incendiary ways so that students *have* to react, saying things like 'women come to university to find eligible mates' and 'walking down the street with a child is a heteronormative sexual act'. I guess what I'm saying is that I think this is kind of cool. I want to have opinions and take stances, whether they appear in academic publications or not. I was thinking about this when reading an article on the preference for formal science over 'local knowledge' or 'experience' or 'wisdom' or whatever you want to call it and the problems that this can create. It led me to think, "all of us have local knowledge, being inhabitants of the world, and this ought to count for something". I hear about people doing literature reviews for their dissertations and it makes me really sad--it's not productive or active, it's reactive. Though maybe that is all of academia. And it's probably not a bad thing, per se. I say this all without having done my research, of course--I'd appreciate thoughts and feedback.
The rest of life, yennow, goes on. I have been focused mainly on academics and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, though still thinking about my devised piece, the second rehearsal for which is this coming Wednesday. I am feeling the end of the semester coming on and the idea that there is not enough time to do ANYTHING, let alone everything. I think I need to start picking my battles, but it's hard when you just want to fight everyone.
That's all. Now, Brian, you say, this is great! This is what you should be doing in university! Universities in the US would kill to have every sentence properly cited and referenced, this is why British universities seem competitive for students, the standard of work that they put out is often academically better because of research and reproduction. Here's the problem with this model: it is just reproduction. A focus on brevity is fantastic, a focus on correct research is great. But put the two together and you end up producing a lot of well-cited parroting of everything that has come before. Even this is not a bad thing, except for the fact that it encourages students to read and unquestioningly accept arguments--or, if they don't accept them, to argue them *in the terms* already laid out for them. US institutions maybe focus too much on the touchy-feely "how does this relate to you and make you feel" of their subjects (I wouldn't know), but here I am beginning to feel that the lack of discussion in classrooms is partly from a lack of critical engagement with the material, 'engagement' and not 'critical' being the operative word. Only in Urban Cultural Geography do people really speak up in lectures, and that's because the professor makes words his statements in incendiary ways so that students *have* to react, saying things like 'women come to university to find eligible mates' and 'walking down the street with a child is a heteronormative sexual act'. I guess what I'm saying is that I think this is kind of cool. I want to have opinions and take stances, whether they appear in academic publications or not. I was thinking about this when reading an article on the preference for formal science over 'local knowledge' or 'experience' or 'wisdom' or whatever you want to call it and the problems that this can create. It led me to think, "all of us have local knowledge, being inhabitants of the world, and this ought to count for something". I hear about people doing literature reviews for their dissertations and it makes me really sad--it's not productive or active, it's reactive. Though maybe that is all of academia. And it's probably not a bad thing, per se. I say this all without having done my research, of course--I'd appreciate thoughts and feedback.
The rest of life, yennow, goes on. I have been focused mainly on academics and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, though still thinking about my devised piece, the second rehearsal for which is this coming Wednesday. I am feeling the end of the semester coming on and the idea that there is not enough time to do ANYTHING, let alone everything. I think I need to start picking my battles, but it's hard when you just want to fight everyone.
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