Karma, Karma (Maybe even Karma Chameleon)
Back when I was at the hippie school (which I'm mentioning often enough on this blog to give it it's own name. Nothing occurs to me at present, but I'll take nominations. Jerry Garcia College? Bong Hits U.? Underwater Basket Weaving Vocational School?). As I was saying, back when I was at hippie school, I had a penchant for theory, as did the professors with whom I chose to work. So, somewhere in my dark, dank basement molders an overflowing file of undergraduate papers on topics like "Kristevan Carnival and Tristram Shandy" and "Time and Narrative: Winterson as read through Paul Ricoeur." Thankfully, this is before I caught the horrible disease that I have now, which involves making terrible puns in my paper titles. If I had had it back then, these papers might announce themselves thus: "Kristeva and Sterne take a Carnival Cruise" or "Time is Like a Clock of the (Ri)Coeur: Winterson and Temporal Narrative." (I think I'm on a Culture Club roll today). Thankfully, theory fever did not overlap with bad a-pun-dicitis. Ba-dum-dum!
Right. Back to the point. Those monster papers are like 20-25 pages a piece, and there are a LOT of them. Which means that some poor fool, some of whom actually still talk to me when begged, READ those suckers and gave me comments on them. Serious comments. Not drunken ramblings in which they contemplated shoving a sharpened pencil in their ears because I was butchering the texts.
I bet you know where this is going, right? Because I'm reading theory papers now, and they're only 5 pages. Why do I grade them on the computer, when it means that I don't have a sharpened pencil to shove in my ear?! How on earth did these scions of patience and pedagogical love manage to deal with me? Bring me the Koo-Aid, and I'll drink it right down!
Somewhere, beneath this screed is the solemn belief that theory is freakin' hard, and that there's no way anyone gets much out of it the first time around, and that it really helps to have had ten more years of reading and training in philosophy, and let's be honest, to what extent do I really understand what we're reading? And all of this is true and relevant.
And thus, I return to Derridean readings of Google videos.
**I wonder how long I could go by titling each post with a reference to an 80's song? Probably pretty long. Some, like "We Don't Have To Take Our Clothes Off (to have a good time)" might be easy to link to my traditional content. "Caribbean Queen" on the other hand, might present more of a problem...
Right. Back to the point. Those monster papers are like 20-25 pages a piece, and there are a LOT of them. Which means that some poor fool, some of whom actually still talk to me when begged, READ those suckers and gave me comments on them. Serious comments. Not drunken ramblings in which they contemplated shoving a sharpened pencil in their ears because I was butchering the texts.
I bet you know where this is going, right? Because I'm reading theory papers now, and they're only 5 pages. Why do I grade them on the computer, when it means that I don't have a sharpened pencil to shove in my ear?! How on earth did these scions of patience and pedagogical love manage to deal with me? Bring me the Koo-Aid, and I'll drink it right down!
Somewhere, beneath this screed is the solemn belief that theory is freakin' hard, and that there's no way anyone gets much out of it the first time around, and that it really helps to have had ten more years of reading and training in philosophy, and let's be honest, to what extent do I really understand what we're reading? And all of this is true and relevant.
And thus, I return to Derridean readings of Google videos.
**I wonder how long I could go by titling each post with a reference to an 80's song? Probably pretty long. Some, like "We Don't Have To Take Our Clothes Off (to have a good time)" might be easy to link to my traditional content. "Caribbean Queen" on the other hand, might present more of a problem...
Labels: pastness, peda-dema-goguery
posted by kfluff at 5:07 PM
2 Comments:
The hippie school totally needs a name.
I'd so love it if you went to one particular hippie school of my acquaintance, although I think it unlikely--yours doesn't have as a mascot a creature that no one outside of the region has ever heard of, does it?
Hah! I bet I know the one you mean. No, mine was a small SLAC hippie school. I'm leaning toward calling it Bong Hit U. It's probably the most appropriate.
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