![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
My new Ancient Mythology "teacher" is a ravening imbecile, and I have decided to attend the class as seldom as possible in order to safeguard my sanity and lower my risk of a fatal stroke. I should have suspected the worst when she casually mentioned during her introduction that she was an archeology student with an "interest" in mythology. I should've run screaming to the nearest computer and dropped her in favor of one of the five other sections of the course. But I'm a creature of habit who'd already prepared myself for the leisure of a late afternoon course, and so I did nothing.
Oh, my God, how I will pay.
The defining moment for me came yesterday. She had included "allegory" as one of the terms with which we should familiarize ourselves. One of the students raised her hand and requested a definition of allegory. A simple request, I thought. After all, if the instructor has included it on a list of important terms, terms upon which we shall construct our analyses of assorted myths, then surely, she knows what it means.
Except she didn't. When pressed for a concise definition, she could not provide one except to offer that it was a form of "symbolism."
As George Carlin would say, "Well, that's a little vague, isn't it?"
Perhaps it would've behooved her to point out that allegory is a type of symbolism in which a character acts as an avatar for an idea or gestalt, a personified or corporeal symbol for abstract concepts undefined by an exact and concrete description. For example, "Young Goodman Brown" by Nathaniel Hawthorne is an example of allegorical fiction exploring the eponymous Young Goodman Brown's loss of faith.
How hard is that, especially for a student working towards a master's degree? I haven't studied allegory since my sophomore year in high school, when I was forced to read "Brown" and The Scarlet Letter. Yet she couldn't do it. Nor could she identify the Native American tribe in Maine who had told a myth about how corn and tobacco came to their tribe. It was the Micmac, for the record. You want to know how I know that? From Stephen King's Pet Semetary, of all places. If I can dredge that formerly useless tidbit from the murky depths of my fannish obsession with Stephen King, then she has no excuse for not doing the most basic of research via such esoteric and secretive technology as Google.
If this woman can't be assed to know whereof she speaks on even the most rudimentary level, then why should I be expected to care? That being said, I'm feebly tempted to put on my l33t intelligence boots and do my damndest to utterly outclass her in every possible respect. I'm not looking to humiliate her, mind, but I shouldn't be better able to explain the myth/legend of Heracles and the hydra after one class in mythology than the woman who holds my academic future in her fumbling hands.
Just reliving yesterday's carnival of incompetence has made me snappish and jittery, so I'm going to watch CSI:NY on Spike and fic before my brain blows a circuit and I spend my remaining years sucking Gerber through a straw in some derelict convalescent home. I can still do that much for my health.
Oh, my God, how I will pay.
The defining moment for me came yesterday. She had included "allegory" as one of the terms with which we should familiarize ourselves. One of the students raised her hand and requested a definition of allegory. A simple request, I thought. After all, if the instructor has included it on a list of important terms, terms upon which we shall construct our analyses of assorted myths, then surely, she knows what it means.
Except she didn't. When pressed for a concise definition, she could not provide one except to offer that it was a form of "symbolism."
As George Carlin would say, "Well, that's a little vague, isn't it?"
Perhaps it would've behooved her to point out that allegory is a type of symbolism in which a character acts as an avatar for an idea or gestalt, a personified or corporeal symbol for abstract concepts undefined by an exact and concrete description. For example, "Young Goodman Brown" by Nathaniel Hawthorne is an example of allegorical fiction exploring the eponymous Young Goodman Brown's loss of faith.
How hard is that, especially for a student working towards a master's degree? I haven't studied allegory since my sophomore year in high school, when I was forced to read "Brown" and The Scarlet Letter. Yet she couldn't do it. Nor could she identify the Native American tribe in Maine who had told a myth about how corn and tobacco came to their tribe. It was the Micmac, for the record. You want to know how I know that? From Stephen King's Pet Semetary, of all places. If I can dredge that formerly useless tidbit from the murky depths of my fannish obsession with Stephen King, then she has no excuse for not doing the most basic of research via such esoteric and secretive technology as Google.
If this woman can't be assed to know whereof she speaks on even the most rudimentary level, then why should I be expected to care? That being said, I'm feebly tempted to put on my l33t intelligence boots and do my damndest to utterly outclass her in every possible respect. I'm not looking to humiliate her, mind, but I shouldn't be better able to explain the myth/legend of Heracles and the hydra after one class in mythology than the woman who holds my academic future in her fumbling hands.
Just reliving yesterday's carnival of incompetence has made me snappish and jittery, so I'm going to watch CSI:NY on Spike and fic before my brain blows a circuit and I spend my remaining years sucking Gerber through a straw in some derelict convalescent home. I can still do that much for my health.
Tags: