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On CLA363, Part III (Epilogue)

By Andrew on July 1st, 2010

On CLA363, Part III (Epilogue)

The conclusion of part II would seem to indicate that I’m about to launch into yet another tirade on CLA363, namely about what the course presentations entailed and how they proceeded and were received. But frankly, I’d much rather just put this massive diatribe on my 2010 summer class experiences to rest. Now in its sixth installment, I’ve spent far too much time and energy trying to express exactly how awful those six or seven weeks were; time and energy that certainly would’ve been better spent doing something constructive and beneficial. So let’s consider this less of a third installment and more of an epilogue. I shall try to be brief.

Presentations weren’t a major component of our overall assessment, thankfully being worth only 20%. The rest was split between class participation, a midterm, and the final exam (10%, 30%, and 40% respectively), so it really wasn’t a bad split by any means. Yet despite class presentations being worth only one fifth of our grade, they encompassed roughly two thirds of our class time. Two hours of every class were dedicated to presentations, while the third hour was the professor’s own recapitulation of the key points and ideas we should know for certain.

Never use the Historia Augusta as a primary source, for example.

The immediate problem I had with this (besides my own ineptitude with public speaking) was that I didn’t trust my peers to prepare good and accurate presentations. When it comes to ancient world studies, there really aren’t that many prominent authorities on specific subjects, especially when the direct, primary evidence to support such positions is scarce. You have to be quite conscientious about whose word you’re taking because classics professors tend to have their own staunch predilections and ideas about whose word can be trusted as a secondary commenter and whose can’t. For this reason, I can’t honestly say that I paid much attention to any particular presentation because I’ve come to be naturally sceptical of the legitimacy of their sources. I really only tuned in for the professor’s recap at the end of lecture, not necessarily because I trusted his sources any more than the rest, but because it’s his authority that would ultimately matter come exam time. Right or wrong (or rather, agree or disagree) I needed to understand his positions more than that of anyone else.

Most presentations were 20 minutes long and received rather well. Those who made clear their secondary sources were scrutinized if the professor had anything pertinent to say on the matter, as often happened with the presentations on drama, law, and education. Aside from that, there really isn’t all that much to say on the subject. Some people used powerpoint, some people distributed handouts with facts and dates relevant to their topic, most just talked for a while about what they had learned. The whole set-up was informal in and of itself, really. Instead of the presenter taking the stand at the front of the room, they just sat and spoke from their seat since the tables were deliberately organized into a square formation beforehand. I actually spoke to someone* who was a Rotman Commerce student doing the course as part of their Classical Civilizations Minor, and she told me that she was amazed at how laid-back the presentation process was. Apparently, “real” presentations always include glossy slideshows, laser pointers, and business formal attire. If that was the case for me, my amateur incoherent stuttering would fail me every time.

I’d much rather write an essay.

To this day, I remain convinced that my presentation was unequivocally the worst of the lot. I won’t go into too much detail as to why, suffice it to say that any presentation which needs to be interrupted by the professor to break painful periods of dead silence and to keep the train wreck moving can’t possibly have been considered to be successful. Nonetheless, I managed an incredibly generous 76%, leaps and bounds over the ~60% I was anticipating.

In all honesty, The Rise and Fall of Athens wasn’t a thoroughly terrible course, but it still fell well short of my expectations. I hated my peers who blathered incessantly and dictated indirectly the focus of the course, yet I loved their stupid questions** which were met with stifled laughter at seldom brilliant moments. I despised the material that was tainted to feature a gender studies edge, yet I adored the absurd moments where Aristophanic comedy was used to offer insights into Athenian democracy and society. Most of my courses so far have been either entirely excellent or entirely dreadful, but The Rise and Fall of Athens was the first to which I would reluctantly apply a “love/hate” label. It was decidedly more hate than love, however, and for that reason I would never take it again.

* Actually that’s a lie. Someone spoke to me before I had a chance to pull out my IEMs.
** “Could the Ancient Greeks swim?” for example.

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On CLA363, Part II

By Andrew on June 28th, 2010

On CLA363, Part II

You may think that I’m making a big deal out of nothing, and in some ways I suppose that you’d be correct for thinking that. There are only two roughly ten minute breaks for a three hour lecture, which would logically mean that I’m only suffering for twenty or so minutes twice a week. I should be able to tolerate that. Really it’s just added incentive to listen to half of a Steely Dan album with head buried in arms. What I’m having trouble conveying is the sort of impending dread I would feel before class started and in the moments leading up to lecture breaks. It’s the sort of crushing atmosphere that afflicts people when they’re expecting either bad news or a natural disaster. Random, senseless, uncontrollable clamor evokes the same feeling for me.

There’s hardly a thing I love more than silence. There’s hardly a thing I hate more than noise. The Rise and Fall of Athens was a course I should have enjoyed by all means, and it ended up irrevocably tainted because people – not just girls (although in some ways girls especially) – never shut the fuck up. It was my idealized vision of an upper level university course becoming reduced to a fifth grade class that’s a little too eager for recess. Regardless, it wouldn’t be particularly fair to pin the blame exclusively on my peers. They only lessened my enthusiasm for being in the same room with their association, while the material itself, along with the prospect of learning, would surely be something to which I could look forward. Sadly, this wasn’t the case.

The best $250 I’ve ever spent.

 I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t learn a single thing from The Rise and Fall of Athens, and yet by the same token, I’d be lying if I said that what I came away with from the course justified the cost of admission. I suppose this has to do with the way it’s structured. Aside from those select Classics courses which focus on a particular subject, such as law, theatre, religion, or myth, most of them seem to be presented as historical overviews with increasing focus. Intro to Classical Studies (CLA160) chronicles 3000BC to fifth century AD, Intro to Greek History (CLA230) dealt with the period from 3000BC to 146BC, The Rise and Fall of Athens (CLA363) covers 478BC to 404BC, etc. As a result, I’ve discovered that I benefit more from courses that proceed through a logical narrative or timeline, which is to say, I like learning important dates followed by learning about the people who made those dates important followed by learning about the context and impact of the events of those dates. The Rise and Fall of Athens, however, turned my preferred manner of learning on its head.

Instead of discussing important people and events (as well as their achievements) in a meaningful narrative, the professor elected to divide the course into broad topics, one of which would be covered each class. So there was one class for democracy, one for war & empire, one for law, and one for education (among a handful of other subjects), which is admittedly a rather novel way to go about business. The risk of three hour long bog standard history lectures then morphs into three hour long exchanges of perspective, interpretation, and idea. But there I go again, babbling about my idealized vision of upper level undergraduate courses. No, what really happened was a sort of amalgamation of two experiences from the autumn session, Women in Antiquity (CLA219) and Intro to Greek History (CLA230).

Intro to Greek History was a brilliant course, instructed by a professor who clearly knew how to pace and present his material over a three hour span. In fact I would wager that it, while not necessarily being my favourite course, was certainly my single most enlightening and informative one so far. Women in Antiquity, on the other hand, was a gossip course, chock full of people who suffix their curiosities regarding the material with “like in 300/Troy/HBO’s Rome?” and instructed by a professor who has absolutely no idea how to lecture a class of over two hundred students. The material wasn’t arranged or presented in a meaningful manner, often disjointedly jumping between broad topics and eras at the drop of a hat, and the majority of class time was spent fielding individual questions that really ought to be self explanatory or common knowledge at this stage. This might sound hypocritical after my resolve to be more intellectually flexible and tolerant, but I defy you not to lose faith in post secondary education when a peer needs to grind the proceedings to a halt so they can ask the lecturer how “Troy” is spelled.

Even the textbook was sloppily assembled, scattershot, and poorly managed.

The Rise and Fall of Athens took the subject matter of Intro to Greek History and coupled it with the structure and presentation of Women in Antiquity. It was the marriage of the best part of a course I adored with the worst bits of a course I loathed. And the clues to indicate as such weren’t even exactly subtle once I began to pay attention to the people in the class with me. As you might imagine, a course about Women in Antiquity would no doubt attract a predominantly female audience, more than a few girls of whom I came to notice in the seats around me during my summer Classics course. And lo, they ruined another course for me. Honestly, for all intents and purposes it should have been called Women in The Rise and Fall of Athens.

Every class, except for the one dealing with war & empire (the only manly subject, which frankly even I don’t enjoy particularly much) was adjusted so that it had a greater emphasis on a modern day conjectured perspective of a woman’s place within the idea. Democracy turned into women’s rights, education turned into a session on how young and adolescent Athenian girls were raised, religion and ritual dealt almost exclusively with priestesses and cults where women play significant roles, etc. These were exactly the sorts of things covered by Women in Antiquity, a course through which I already had the odious pleasure of suffering. I wasn’t learning anything particularly new or interesting, the six other people with a Y chromosome who presumably had more interest in Athens than ancient women were sorely disappointed, and the girls who had taken Women in Antiquity got to learn the exact same things all over again. I could probably count the number of people who genuinely wished for and enjoyed this unexpected and unnecessary change of emphasis on one hand.

As far as I know, the professor did not build this course around the people that would come to enrol in it. Even if he noticed the not at all difficult to overlook female gender dominance by looking at the attendance list before hand, and thus decided to make a few adjustments by means of anecdotal content for that sake, the simple fact is that he chose not to have control over the way the course unfolded. Simply put, he let us dictate the direction of the course by making our own individual assignments for the class presentations on a specific area of interest. So with most of the class being girls with a vested interest in gender studies, the course was effectively doomed to be a useless waste of time.

Women in the Rise and Fall of Athens 2.0:
The 200-series course that promenades like a 300-series one.
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On CLA363, Part I

By Andrew on June 26th, 2010

On CLA363, Part I

To conclude this little adventure in documenting my less than stellar experiences with summer courses, I must now offer a few words on The Rise and Fall of Athens (CLA363). In some ways, this course has a great deal in common with Stars and Galaxies and Introductory Geology; not necessarily by means of content and subject matter, but more with regards to how I initially felt about enrolling in it. Truth be told, I wasn’t looking forward to any of these courses. Strangely, I was more enthusiastic towards the idea of summer classes, and not so much the courses I’d be taking. There’s a certain comfort and reliability in summer classes for me, which I suppose will inevitably happen after doing it for six consecutive years. What I’m doing doesn’t matter nearly as much as the pleasant feeling of being occupied with at least doing something. Perhaps it’s time that I break out of that mindset. In recent years, it’s been a sort of resignation that keeps me coming back, not enthusiasm and receptiveness. I guess that it all came to a head this time, which is why events didn’t unfold exactly as how I planned.

With The Rise and Fall of Athens, however, I was rather confident that it would be an enjoyable course, despite certain portents from the winter session that seemed to indicate otherwise. You see, people who go for either the Classical Civilizations Major or Classical Civilizations Minor aren’t exactly spoiled for choice when it comes to getting their 300-series requisites out of the way. Oh sure, the course calendar gives the impression that there’s a wide selection on offer, but only four half courses are offered per session which often means that the faces of my peers in the department get a little too familiar for my liking. For example, Classical Literature in Translation (CLA386), Sexuality and Gender in Classical Literature (CLA319), Roman Republic (CLA367), and The Rise and Fall of Athens (CLA363) were the quartet offered in the winter. More than a few people did two or more of the four (myself included), and some even took them all at the same time. For this reason, I was often privy to the gossip that went around regarding the goings-on in the other courses, simply by showing up five minutes early to claim my usual seat at one of the back corners of the room. CLA386 was awesome, CLA319 was rubbish, CLA367 had a boring and dry lecturer, and (most relevant to this entry) CLA363 was crazy difficult with an awful textbook.

Most of the above courses take place in the same room in the same building.

So, having a vague idea of what to expect from CLA363 already, why did I bother taking it? Four reasons, really:

  • I needed one more 300-series to finish off my own Classical Civilizations Major.
  • There was a big empty gap on my timetable between the end of Introductory Geology (12PM) and the beginning of Stars and Galaxies (6PM) which, in retrospect, probably would’ve been better filled with either movies or studying.
  • The course underwent an overhaul to make it more agreeable.
  • I knew the professor beforehand.

Those last two points are the ones I let convince me. Yet while the difficulty of the course wasn’t much of a concern for me, largely because my anomalously thorough notes from Intro to Greek History (CLA230) would undoubtedly serve me well, it was the fact that I knew the professor from two other courses (Introductory Ancient Greek [GRK100] and Classical Literature in Translation [CLA386]) that finally compelled me to give it a chance.

To my (probably limited) knowledge, glowing references are absolutely imperative for Graduate School consideration. In order to get those references, you need to get all chummy with certain people during your undergrad. And in order to get all chummy with those certain people, you need to take their courses. For this reason, whenever it comes to choosing my next batch of courses, I always make an effort to go for the ones instructed by professors whom I’ve had before. I haven’t determined exactly how this may reflect on me as a student yet, nor have I discovered if this information is true. Be that as it may, a leg up is a leg up, and for once I’m not going to argue with that.

In April, I signed up for The Rise and Fall of Athens 2.0 with an excellent professor who knows me well and has a positive impression of me. Midway through June, I wanted to chuck the course and half of my peers within it into a volcano. What went wrong, you may find yourself asking? This may sound facetiously puerile, but I’ve come to the conclusion that girls are to blame. I suppose that last bit warrants explanation…

Perhaps it’s just me, but do you remember in grade school how it always seemed to be the girls in the class who were favoured by teachers and held up as models of erudition? How it was always Sarah Jane who would raise their hand first, nail every question, never miss a homework assignment, and write in impossibly immaculate penmanship? In my estimation, it’s mostly the Sarah Janes of the world who come to summer classes in university, especially when they don’t necessarily have to. Class averages tend to be higher in summer courses because the only people who sign up for them are usually the ones who genuinely either need them or wish to do them. I’m in the former category; Sarah Jane’s in the latter, and her ilk outnumbered me this time.

Doesn’t actually know anyone by the name of “Sarah Jane”. I just got that from a song off of this album.

For the first little while, I honestly never noticed. For as far as I was paying attention, my peers were just the usual assortment of folks whom I would spend the next six weeks largely ignoring. At about the third lecture, however, just enough time had passed that people were beginning to get to know each other, exchanging anecdotes, cell phone numbers, facebook accounts, and whatever else. No one ever pestered me about such things, thankfully, since as soon as we broke for ten minutes I would just pop in my IEMs and play solitaire on my iPod. But at the third lecture, however, a curious thing happened. The 60% of full volume that is normally well sufficient for keeping me isolated from idle chit-chat failed to be enough. I began to hear fragments of conversations, and shrill laughter would occasionally stab my ears. I pulled out my right monitor, and a din of noise like I had never heard during a lecture break assaulted me. Boisterous conversations about pets and clothes, useless things, relentlessly battled each other, as if hell bent on figuring out who could be more annoying. I looked around the room, and girls were nearly all I saw, with gaping mouths incessantly flapping their gums. From that moment on, I simply could not enjoy the class.

I can’t stress enough the degree to which I’m honestly trying not to be misogynistic when I say these things. While the above is an accurate description of that particular incident, I’m deliberately trying to exaggerate things for narrative and dramatic impact. To avoid partiality, I must concede that there is a possibility that guys can be just as guilty of obnoxious small talk as girls. Not so for The Rise and Fall of Athens, I’m afraid. They damn well nearly never gave us a chance. It was so unbearable that even the professor, normally the sort to sit patiently in class going over papers or whatnot, would step out to his office for ten or fifteen minutes before coming back. As for me, it was a toss up between either damaging my ears with louder music to better escape, or taking my chances in the fray.

It was only on the last day of class that I actually bothered to calculate what the ratio of males to females was. There were seven guys (myself included) and twenty-one girls; a 1 : 3 ratio. A fairly overwhelming margin if I may be so bold as to say so. I’m used to lecture breaks where people either have quiet conversations between themselves or just sit around fiddling with a cellphone or laptop patiently, but with numbers like that I should not have been that surprised at the volume. I was always told that girls get along with each other quicker and more easily than guys do, but never really thought all that much about it. Now I fear that I’ll forever be cautious of classes where there’s a gender majority, be it a male or a female one.

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On AST201

By Andrew on June 21st, 2010

On AST201

While it’s entirely reasonable to assume that an initially difficult course may get easier with experience, never maintain that a course which starts out like child’s play won’t suddenly pull a similar reversal. For the first two or three lectures of Stars and Galaxies (AST201), I often joked that I would probably find reruns of Magic School Bus to be more challenging and engaging. When the instructor threw up slides demonstrating the relative size of the planets, audible gasps and whispers echoed throughout the hall as if the fact that Jupiter is “really big” is a shattering revelation. To this very day, my reflections of this particular moment are conflicted. Were these people seriously that oblivious to the shear vastness of the universe and, by extension, the insignificance of human life? Should I feel proud that an astronomical tidbit which blew the minds of most of the class was something so mundane and banal for me? Was this just a gimmick deployed for a superficial connection between audience, lecturer, and material?
.
Some seven weeks after that first evening lecture, I’m leaning more towards the lattermost possibility. It would be incredibly pompous and foolish of me to claim that I’m brighter than my 200 peers in the course just because I didn’t respond to a trivial factoid while the rest of the lot did. And yet at the same time, it is completely becoming of my character. A great deal of my trouble with connecting to classmates, colleagues, and others in general, is to do with an inability to turn off that cynical part of my personality and simply engage the situation. Sitting back in disinterest and being mentally condescending in such moments has become a sort of default reaction to such scenarios, which leads me to wonder whether or not I’d be a better student if I could just respond to such methods and material more honestly and immediately.

Allow me to take a step back and interpret the “Jupiter is really big” scenario another way. The professor knows full well that hardly anybody in the class would receive this news as anything but common sense. On the contrary, this is the sort of entirely obvious yet compulsory material that must be taught, so why not try and turn it into some sort of engaging spectacle? The professor would deliberately deliver the fact so as to encourage a response from the audience, who is obliged by common courtesy and competence to receive it on the particular implied level, and respond accordingly. Being told that Jupiter is “really big” isn’t mindblowing, nor is that the sort of result the fact is expected to generate. It’s simply the lecturer delivering the information in a particular manner so as to evoke a desired reaction, and the audience, in turn, does their part by comprehending the signals and responding in accordance with what is expected. It’s class participation on a more subtle level.

We also had to use these stupid things.

Where does this leave me, then; someone who actively refuses to engage on that level? Well for one, it leaves me with another $750 hole in my wallet. I consciously pull myself out of the lecture, look down at those who either go along for the ride or genuinely felt informed, and feed my throbbing ego by telling myself that I’m better than everyone else because I knew that Jupiter is “really big” before the session while they did not. This is self sabotage, really. I’m beginning to think that I don’t have the assumed faculty of intellectual flexibility and tolerance that university seems to presuppose in students. I’ll shut down the instant I feel that valuable lecturing time is being frittered away on subjects of which the material should go without discussion, then do foolish things including dozing off in class, refusing to take notes, and showing up either late or not at all.

Sometimes, the way in which a lecture is presented is very specific and deliberate. Good speakers don’t take to the podium unprepared and without a script, and I now realize that the same is true for university lecturers. If I had only accepted this seven weeks ago, perhaps I’d be cramming for three exams tonight, not just two. As it stands, there’s nothing I can do about it now. It’s just a matter of taking my Astronomy textbook back to the book store, and seeing how much they’ll give me for it used. I seriously doubt that I’ll be needing it in the future anyway.

So Stars and Galaxies… the only thing that would make you second guess the certainly accurate assumption that this a bird course (besides my failing of it, obviously) might be its standing at the 200-level. Aside from that, everything about it is purely introductory. The lack of sciences and mathematics prerequisites means that there’s no risk of scary chemical formulas and equations, and thus it is largely resigned to something of a history course, at least for the first little while. The beginning of the course dealt with the origins of the universe and humanity’s position within it, the ending dealt with the future of those two things, and the chewy centre was loaded with all sorts of astronomical principles and rationales, none of which I could be bothered to retain.

I suppose the main draw of Stars and Galaxies, and indeed the field of Astronomy in general, would be those fundamental questions of purpose and origin that folks like to get all misty-eyed and pseudo-philosophical about. How did the universe form? How did we come into being? Is there some sort of divine or cosmological plan? It’s a sharp hook, and indeed a strong point with which to introduce and conclude the course. Unfortunately, the scope of the course isn’t limited to probing these novelties exclusively, and it becomes necessary to make an effort at least to teach some scientific stuff. And this is where I lost interest entirely.

Science textbooks make for terrible reading, too.

Sciences and mathematics have always struck me as boring because I usually interpret the goal of such fields as finding single absolute answers to specific questions. For this reason, proficiency tends to be dictated more by a person’s ability to rattle off lists of formulas, laws, and equations, and not necessarily about creative thinking. There isn’t room in sciences and mathematics for multiple answers and perspectives. Whenever incompatibilities and inconsistencies crop up between two opposing thoughts, the end result is always the acceptance of one and the total disregard of the other. The foundation of such studies is the “true until proven false” mantra, which is completely unappealing for me.

Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not condemning sciences and mathematics as wastes of time; I’m merely saying that I don’t find anything attractive about those areas of study. What sours me about those fields is that they’re more about facts than about reasons, where success seems largely to be found in memorization and not necessarily interpretation.

Yet despite all this, my reasons for disliking sciences and mathematics aren’t exactly the same as my reasons for disliking Stars and Galaxies. No, what really bothered me about the course is how we were instructed to find answers through the use of principles and laws that weren’t adequately explained. We were just told what to do, with the how and why taking a backseat. I love the how and why; they’re my two favourite questions. Stars and Galaxies didn’t seem to agree.

“Jupiter is really big”
“Why? How?”
“It just is.”

This exact dialogue didn’t take place, but it’s a fairly accurate distillation of what the Stars and Galaxies experience is like. Being told spectacular facts may engage for a little while, but failing to examine the reasons for these facts (or failing to inspire a drive to discover the reasons) means that a person will likely learn a lot without actually learning anything.

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Untitled #1

By Andrew on June 20th, 2010

Pictures make even mundane posts slightly interesting.

I’ve always wanted to try my hand at writing short stories and narratives, and the previous two posts that detail my experiences with summer courses have proved to be interesting exercises. Mind you that they’re a bit too autobiographical for my liking, what with my rather reclusive nature and all, but it’s still a quite productive way to procrastinate. I’ll be taking a break from Geology studying tomorrow to write another short story on how much Astronomy sucks, so I suppose you can always look forward to that.

Oh, and please forgive any gratuitous misspellings and errors in those last two posts. I haven’t got the MS Office suite back on my computer yet, so those last two entries were composed on Google Documents. I’ve always said that, when it comes to spelling, I’m helpless without squiggly red lines pointing out my every mistake. Now you may just get to see how helpless I am.

One last thing…

England vs. Slovenia, Wednesday at 10:30AM.

Rise and Fall of Athens exam, Wednesday from 9AM – 12PM.

Let’s just say that I’m not double checking or second guessing my answers.