Writing papers is so fun that I forgot what I wrote

I had two papers due this week, both of them on Thursday.  I spent all night Wednesday writing most of the first one, then woke up at 6 to finish it.  My body, however, just lay in bed without a movement of protest until around 7.  Then I got up and typed more of it and started the second paper until 11.  

I went to class, where the TA’s are still running the show this week, and had the rough draft in tow with me.  My plan was to write more on the rough while feigning attention to the lecture.  But we were watching some erotically obsessed pygmy chimps cavort around on an old PBS special. Distracted, I proceeded no further on my rough.

After getting out of class, I had an hour and a half before my next class to complete my papers.  20 minutes before the start of class I was done.  Then I spent 25 minutes figuring out a way to print my paper on two sides.  7 minutes after that, I was in class, running with a backpack exactly one page heavier than an hour before.

After turning in the paper for the second class, I awaited for the class to end at 5. Then I had 30 minutes to email the final version of my first paper to the TA’s.  The only thing to complete was my conclusion.  I truly wrote some gibberish, but I do remember it was stylistically quite elegant.  Two minutes before the deadline I attached the paper and emailed it away.  

A few hours later now, I can’t remember to tell you what it was I wrote.  

Don’t have a soul! Do too!

So at my last phil. of neuroscience class, my teacher was gone on a trip. The TA’s were in charge of the lecture. They allowed much more dialogue amidst the students than the teacher does.

Unfortunately, the most pedantic and loudest student sits almost directly behind me. This is the first student I have ever come across who sounds patronizing when giving an answer to a question. What is really unbearable though, is he says things well within the realm of common knowledge, but with a long-winded and repetitive manner. I found this out the first day, so that I now just flip through my notes whenever I hear the preliminary huffs when he is about to swell up.

On Tuesday, after one of his unchecked sermonettes another student got into him for a few minutes. Beginning with the natural vs synthetic nature of pure numbers, it devolved into a back and forth about the nature of biology. Abysmal arguing, juvenile emoting, and the entire class was sighing an invisible gasp.

If you ain’t a philosopher, does your major matter?

An interesting article from the NY Times about the rising popularity in the classes and major of Philosophy.

Excerpts:

Once scoffed at as a luxury major, philosophy is being embraced at Rutgers and other universities by a new generation of college students who are drawing modern-day lessons from the age-old discipline as they try to make sense of their world…

“If I were to start again as an undergraduate, I would major in philosophy,” said Matthew Goldstein, the CUNY* chancellor, who majored in mathematics and statistics.

Some schools with established programs like Texas A&M, Notre Dame, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, now have twice as many philosophy majors as they did in the 1990s.

Max Bialek, 22, was majoring in math until his senior year, when he discovered philosophy. “I thought: Why weren’t all my other classes like that one?”

*City University of New York

Mae West, coming from my dream

Today few students showed for both my Greek and Latin classes, so I asked my professor at the start if I could share with him the dream I had before the first day of classes.

A few students behind me, eager to delay the onset of Latin rigors, said yes.  So I shared with the class my vision of Mae West. 

After disturbing the whole class, without exception, I expected a quick laugh and then for us to go on.  Instead he cleared off the table at the front of the room, even moving his trademarked two juice boxes, a pair of which he drinks every classhour.  He then proceeded to lay down and impersonate Ms. West, spouting out some memorable lines.  A few students wandered in separately, well after the class had begun.  He immediately asked them if they knew who Mae West was.  Some on further prodding divulged some interesting facts about her.  All of them said yes, and all of us laughed.

Will not laughing at you hurt my grade?

Many students have, including myself, laughed at their professor after a well put joke or some seredipitous mishap in view of the entire class. But there is a different type of humor, humorless in fact, which only the most obnoxious find laughter in.

It is this situation: Quite often, we are expected, in various classes, to have read a particular section of a book. Already read. The professor then will expound the relevant parts of the passage. But then the professor comes to a joke that we should have already read once, but he proceeds to tell it, understandably, and some students laugh at it, not understandably.

The way I see it, if you read something humorous once, the element of surprise has been eliminated. So I find an outburst of laughter very difficult to imagine after one has already read the humor.

My conclusion: Someone laughing at what the professor said is a tacit admission that they did not read the text in the first place or they are a deliberate sycophant.

There, now I can have my laugh, or am I wrong?