It's not class... it's mental boot camp
Shortly before I was to graduate with my oh-what-do-you-do-with-a BA in English, I was talking to one of my relatives on the phone. I told him I was considering going to grad school. As he is a lawyer, it did not surprise me much when he suggested I go to law school instead. I didn't want to go to law school, so I sarcastically told him, "Nah, I don't really feel like going to school for three years so I can memorize things that could just as easily be looked up in a book." He wisely told me that the point of law school was not to memorize laws, it was to train you to think like a lawyer.
Well, I didn't go to law school. I chose to do graduate work in English instead. And it has become pretty clear to me that English graduate work has very little to do with literature. After all, you can look that stuff up in books. No, English graduate school is mainly about teaching me how to think like an English major. Because once I am trained to think like an English major, I will be able to write scholarly articles. And if I get scholarly articles published, I will have contributed to the field and will thus be considered for teaching positions at the college level. Seriously, who here doesn't believe that my ability to get an article published is directly related to my ability to help, say, freshmen math majors understand Hamlet?
Actually, that's a bit cynical. I chose the program I'm in so I'd get to take classes about teaching as well as classes about literature. I think by the time I get my PhD, I might actually be prepared enough to be a pretty good English professor. I'm just frustrated because I'm writing a paper right now and somehow I've managed to take a single sentence and write a whole page explaining it. While I do enjoy occasionally exercising my exegetical prowess, I have this mental disconnect about how this paper is doing anything other than forcing me to think like an English major.
Well, I didn't go to law school. I chose to do graduate work in English instead. And it has become pretty clear to me that English graduate work has very little to do with literature. After all, you can look that stuff up in books. No, English graduate school is mainly about teaching me how to think like an English major. Because once I am trained to think like an English major, I will be able to write scholarly articles. And if I get scholarly articles published, I will have contributed to the field and will thus be considered for teaching positions at the college level. Seriously, who here doesn't believe that my ability to get an article published is directly related to my ability to help, say, freshmen math majors understand Hamlet?
Actually, that's a bit cynical. I chose the program I'm in so I'd get to take classes about teaching as well as classes about literature. I think by the time I get my PhD, I might actually be prepared enough to be a pretty good English professor. I'm just frustrated because I'm writing a paper right now and somehow I've managed to take a single sentence and write a whole page explaining it. While I do enjoy occasionally exercising my exegetical prowess, I have this mental disconnect about how this paper is doing anything other than forcing me to think like an English major.
posted by Yax at 6:03 PM
2 Comments:
This reminds me of a discussion I once had with a wise cousin, who advised me that if I ever wanted to do anything in science, I'd have to get a handle on math. He was, of course, right. (He also did not remember that discussion until I refreshed his memory.) I would never have become a chemist had I not taken a fairly large amount of college level math.
Oddly enough, however, I hardly ever use any of my immense mathematical prowess for anything more complicated than calculating the molarity of a solution or the percent weight of a solid mixture -- something we learned to do in freshman chemistry. So why did I take all that math in college? Why, to teach me to think like a scientist, that's why.
::sigh:: I'm there with you, Matt. Which is why, as the weeks pass, I'm glad my program is actually for writing and not for straight English... the two papers I have due this month are killing me... I thought I'd left Sir Gawain behind with Dr. Brown.
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