Thanksgiving...

[icarus]

Just got out of a painful Sanskrit exam. Very little sleep studying, though it doesn't seem to have made any difference.

It's hard not to write fanfic right now, I'm bunnied like hell, but my resolve is firm: until Sankrit is is done for the quarter, no fanfiction. The teasing bits of Out Of Bounds will have to wait. The little hints of the next part of Last Port Of Call, forget it, I'm not even writing anything down. If the story ideas are there still, later, fine. If not, I still do not have time.

This is the hardest class I've ever taken, bar none, and I feel like a ship going around Cape Horn -- battered, tired, and still in for more. I'm not the star in this class, and that hurts. Last Friday was the single-most humiliating day of my academic career.

Two more weeks and then the final. Do I have a vacation coming up? No, I'll be studying my ass off.

The substitute Sanskrit teacher the past few days was, with few exceptions, universally disliked. Personally, I don't think he was arrogant or dismissive. He was just a little... well, he's in the middle of teaching second-year Sanskrit, so first-year first-quarter Sanskrit students came as something of a shock. You could almost see him down-shifting.

That said, last Friday, even the classics major clung to her desk with the miserable look of a wet puppy.

All the regulars skipped Monday (I joked there was "one and a half people" in class that day) and as a result the class is far behind and has only a sketchy concept of the 10 verb classes. Study this weekend will have to make up for what we didn't get from him, and I also have to review chapter six because in theory I get relative and correlatives but in reality, no -- I don't understand. There's a conceptual leap that just hasn't happened. (Sanskrit experts, please hold off on the advice. I'm really too tired and stressed to take it with any amount of grace.)

As for my creative writing teacher, I decided I do not want the drama (and distraction) of fighting, and I don't want to do damage to him either. If he dings me on my grade for personal reasons, I can challenge it later but I'm not going to deal with it now.

My sense is that not only am I getting nothing out of the class, but my writing has actually been hurt by it. I tested this. For my last assignment I gave him something I wrote back in 2004. Sure enough, according to him it's far better than anything I've turned in so far. He probably thinks that I've improved when in fact I'm going to have to unlearn everything he's taught. *gets out the memory eraser*

The very idea of cleaning house all day and preparing Thanksgiving dinner... I hate to be uncharitable, but I wish wildernessguru hadn't invited his friends from work for Thanksgiving. Normally Thanksgiving is just us, or people we know, long-time friends.

*face in hands* I can't believe I agreed to this.

Comments

[enname.livejournal.com]

You have my deepest sympathies, I know what it is like to be struggling with a class and still wanting to have some sort of life outside it even if it is just to write down other thoughts and ideas.

Goodluck for the haul.

There are still no words for the completely misnamed 'creative' writing class either. It is just ridiculous that you can go backwards in your writing from taking the class. Utterly stupid.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

There are still no words for the completely misnamed 'creative' writing class either. It is just ridiculous that you can go backwards in your writing from taking the class. Utterly stupid.

I've heard of it happening, and by george, it does. Sometimes it's just a bad teacher-student combination. In his case I think his negative attitude towards his students colors his feedback (that comment about the rest of the class "they were probably out getting high over the weekend" made me blink).

He's been too... formulaic... in his approach to teaching. "No adverbs." "No summary." No this, no that. All "negatives" or "do nots." People latch on as if following the rules will make them better writers, or else out of fear that he'll penalize us if we use adverbs. The only "positive" he's taught is to write cinematically, which has resulted in everyone over-describing, not picking and choosing their details.

His feedback is generally negative with a few "canned" positive statements, which is him following the "rules" of good teaching without getting the point of encouraging the students. He blunts his criticism by hedging and being vague, saying "kind of" and "sort of" and "a little." The result is that students are discouraged (and more likely to reach for "no adverb" bandaids) but have no clear idea what to do with the story.

He's good, very good, at leading discussion. He keeps control of the class, is able to initiate conversation, draw quieter students in, and bat the discussion back and forth without putting forth too much of his own input. He'd be a great lit professor, I think. There his critical approach would suit.

I do feel vindicated at the objective observation, from him, that my pre-class work is better. Yeah. I thought as much.

As for Sanskrit, I'll survive. I'm not getting this chapter, but if I plug away this weekend maybe it'll start making sense.

Icarus

[rike-tikki-tavi.livejournal.com]

I'm keeping my fingers crossed for your Sanskrit class. It sounds insanely complex, much more difficult than what I remember from my Russian classes.

The creative writing teacher deserves to be thwacked. I think I said that before. I'm no writer, so I might be missing something here, but why no adverbs? I mean, they exist for a reason, right? If he said, use adverbs sparingly [adverb], that I could understand, but any generalized no this, no that is not very helpful.