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.