Whinging about uni and stuff
17 Mar 2006Today was, erm, interesting. One of the few people at uni that I’ve met since starting there (Will), and with whom I shared two courses (more than with any other person I know/have spoken to more than once), transferred degrees today and is now going to be studying at Cumberland campus. Which is totally a good thing from where he’s sitting and Cumberland is even closer and stuff, but… gah! -1 friend! This whole meeting-lots-of-people-and-trying-to-remember-names thing is way over-rated. Not that there’s really any alternative if I’m going to do uni without going crazy/existing in some ridiculous Christian-only underworld (because those are the people I’m guaranteed to meet) — though perhaps the two aren’t that distinct ;-)
So I thought I was starting to go places on that front. Apparently not. It’s interesting trying to make friends and meeting new people, and balancing the fact that you really want to make friends with, well, everything else. As in, when you’re in a tut and after speaking to the person next to you for 10 minutes (intro session thingy) realise that you’re really not going to get along (I don’t just mean disagree about stuff… I don’t mind that at all!) even though you can keep a conversation up quite easily with the usual boring questions about what degree, courses, subsequent-application-of-Arts-degree-in-some-way and so forth… but know that even if you actively tried to sit next to this person in a tutorial (or, shock, even a lecture of too-many-people) it wouldn’t be a particularly stimulating/enjoyable experience.
Maybe you read that and are now convinced I’m a snob. If so, we all are. If someone’s agenda revolves around sport, we’re not going to have particularly stimulating conversations unless they diverge into literature/IT/history/random films they’ve seen/books they’ve read/ideas+more abstract matters. That is, stimulating conversations by my reckoning. Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of dialogism applies here: in a competition between several competing perspectives, it is acceptable — if not expected — that I will “foreground” my own values here. Heh. So… be offended, or not, whatever. Preferably not… I haven’t really said anything offensive, only that I don’t like talking about sport for prolonged periods: mostly because I have never made any great effort to follow any sport in particular, which has a tendancy to make conversation a little strained… and, in a dialogic way, tend to force myself into the background (contrary to the notion that one will always tend to foreground oneself!)
There we go. Bundled literary elitism. Good stuff. (Not that hard to follow, though Wikipedia’s Dialogism article is a bit crap… I think stub-like)
Anyway. Had my first Philosophy tut yesterday and was thoroughly unimpressed, I think in part coz it took me too long to find the room and it was overcrowded and I was tired and already irritable, and then our tutor person started using “true/false” and “valid/invalid” interchangably for half the tut, which was probably the most unhelpful thing he possibly could have done at that point. I had a perfectly sound understanding of everything we’d covered before going into that tut, spent 30 minutes in utter befuzzlement, then after a bit of aggressive questioning we got back to sanity. I wasn’t the only one [asking questions]… but started off the cascade of questions leading back to the core idea I’m pretty sure most people already understood, and started off… probably too aggressively. Now my tutor probably hates me from the very start… not that I really care, because the class size is like… 32 or thereabouts, so it’s way too big for something in which engaging (as in, engaging of all in the group) discussion can feasibly be had. Same goes for remembering names.
Then the philosophy lecture today was all about rabbits or “Bunnies”, as the lecturer — different person to the tutor — so fondly calls them. Heh. Oooh… indicator of my mood in tutorial is an example I gave to make a point about distinction between invalid/untrue. Sorry, have to share this whilst on the subject of bunnies!
- All bunnies will die in 2005.
- It is 2006.
- Bugs Bunny is a rabbit.
- Therefore, Bugs Bunny is dead.
Muwahaha. (The point being that my argument is “valid”, even if my premises are “false” — and hence my conclusion is also “false”.) Anyway. Today’s lecture was all about bunnies and how carbohydrates are like crack (as in cocaine) to them. Other crack references abounded. Lecturer spoke about free will. Spoke about how he’d love to lecture naked… notes that was a joke, and that he would be too ashamed. Moves back to crack. Runs out of time, rushes through pictures of furry animals, microphone stops working (repeatedly — it was demonstrating free will to ignore what he was saying), starts talking about cocaine some more. He has free will to consume all the crack he wants, as we have free will to ridicule him. Certainly the people sitting around me were ridiculing him… others may have thought he was the coolest thing since… something cool. I dunno, junkie philosophers don’t really do it for me. He was explaining some basic stuff about the nature of free will at the start, and put up a ridiculously simple point in his overheads, saying “This is when you wish you weren’t accumulating a HECS debt to hear me teaching you”. If it wasn’t true then, it certainly was by the end of that lecture. I don’t know how much HECS works out to per lecture, but my guess is it was a moderately expensive evening at a comedy venue without the benefit of comfortable chairs or bundled food.
Doo be doo. I’ve got all this positive stuff to say about how interesting all my subjects are, but against a backdrop of all that I don’t suppose it’d be particularly effective. Although, if you’ve read this far, you’re probably into procrastination as much as that lecturer was into bunny rabbits on crack. Oh well. I’m done typing, it’s late, I need to go to work tomorrow. And I’ll be away for most of the weekend, likely start the week exhausted, die in my Greek test on Monday, and so on.
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