If I had just been able to get in contact with this professor over the summer I would have had no problems at all.
I'm enrolled in the 19th-century U.S. seminar for the upcoming quarter, and am curious as to whether you have a specific time period or theme in mind for the class. Or...well, I haven't taken a seminar before, so truthfully I'm not exactly sure. I've tried reading what I can over the summer on the Whig party (Michael Holt's), and while it's great, there's more to the United States during the 19th century than just that. Any input would be appreciated.
No response. I didn't send it until 8/29. Because there was no available listing of who was actually teaching the seminar until then. I enrolled in the seminar back in May. It was the only seminar both on the U.S. in the 19th, and the only one with no professor listed.
I found out yesterday on the syllabus she handed out that she does not use the campus email as listed on the...the campus website. Uses a yahoo email and apparently doesn't know how to set her campus email to forward emails to...to the yahoo one. And I guess either never checks the campus email anyway, or just...doesn't...just doesn't whatever.
I had a similar problem exactly a year ago with the black "Nationalism/Assimilation" class I took. Not exactly the same; that professor responded that all he had was a reading list for the last time he taught the class a couple years ago if I wanted it. Which I responded that I would really appreciate the reading list (like I Really want to jump into a class titled that cold)...and never got a response from him again. When I got his syllabus, the email listed wasn't even different from the one I had been using. Maybe not very similar, but close enough for me to not want to have anything to do with ethnic studies professors. They're just so...impossibly unprofessional.
Seriously, duBois is not going to turn over in his grave just because you occasionally checked a different email that doesn't have banner ads for free makeup or pizza or std cures along the sides of it. Having been a spoiled college kid himself, he'd probably actually appreciate it.
I tried talking to this professor earlier today. Turned out she was in a hurry to prepare for another class she's teaching, so could I come back at 4-which is her actual office hour anyway. But after ... well, Jon's advice was to talk to her about my umm "concerns" and if she sounds like she's dead set on her direction for the class, then to just drop the class immediately , drop it like a rock. I asked if I could drop it like it's hot. He said I could do that too, but I'm not sure right now if I want to. ummm. Nah I'm pretty sure.
We didn't say much when I just went, just that I'm interested not only in something different from slavery and the notion and expectations of Reconstruction...or whatever...but that I am not comfortable with the aaaaaaaaah I guess "method" of historial analysis. Translated into English, I do not respect that kind of scholarship. I think it's a joke. My experience with academic people related to this study is that they're mind-numbingly, incredibly fucking ignorant of the very history they want to create and guilt trip others into celebrating.
Whether this makes me a bad person, or whether I should just right now save this post as a draft and go back to slinging pizza where I belong...what, am I going to graduate school? With my shitty GPA, not immediately after graduation. Doesn't really matter so much as that I don't want to take the seminar now.
Oh boo hoo it isn't so much about the fact of what I read over the summer. Even if I'd read all summer about Reconstruction itself, or the later 19th century there's no way I'd want to be in that class. I can read and study Coin's Financial School just as much as Gouge's History of Banking in the United States. Not a problem.
If I stay in the seminar, I'm not going to do shit. Not as in some positivist, ...idunno. I didn't get any work done last night after I got out of the seminar class itself. Didn't even go running. I looked and was surprised that it was already 11pm by...well, by 11pm. And that's...that's what I've been doing ever since I got here five years ago. Annoyed as fuck by how stupid this all is, depressed by how completely apathetic and ignorant this place is, and instead of gosh golly bucking down and jumping through the stupid hoops for my work permit, I completely tune it out and do my own thing, whether reading von Mises, or the random discount books the library sells for 50 cents...the last one I got that way being Bagehot's English Constitution. Or Mark Noll's Scandal.
And maybe that means I'm not a good person, it almost certainly proves me to not be a good student.
sigh. Whatever. I'll drop this seminar, already talked to the History advisor...all the other seminars this quarter are full and not admitting anyone else (the others going on right now are 20th century US and American Thought/Culture, either of which can be doable), so to keep fulltime student status I'll take in ...whatever the hell it is I showed up for today, Law and Society in Medieval Europe. Same instructor as the Early Middle Ages, so I know what kinda to expect, and he's immensely respectable. Guess since he's also teaching a seminar on the Middle Ages/Medieval History in the spring quarter, I can do that. Popeasaurs are cool, it won't be that bad.




