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runawayskellum at 11:10pm on 17/03/2010 under i know because of my learning
runawayskellum at 11:10pm on 17/03/2010 under i know because of my learningTeaching awards are happening this month, and I am TORN.
The best lecturers I've had at university were for a subject I only took for one semester. They're equally responsible for me realising what I really OUGHT to be studying - sociology - and kicking myself for not picking a school that actually teaches it. Grumble grumble.
The class was sociology. It was all okay, you know, fairly interesting, whatever. Some fascinating stuff about how different cultures view what we think of as objective, physical features of the world - colour, space, time, that kind of thing - with just a tantalising hint of why my culture might think that.
The class was split into fortnight or three-week long chunks on different topics, with different professors coming in to lecture on something they specialise in. So it started with the physical reality thing, then a bit of kinship, then play behaviour, and it's all mildly interesting. But the two topics that blew me away were Discourse and Biology. This was the first time I'd ever been taught something from a explicitly feminist viewpoint. It was AWESOME. The thing is, I'm a pretty uneducated feminist - I call myself one because, you know, it seems obvious and instinctual that men and women are equal, that misogyny and patriarchy underly a lot of society and hurt a lot of people. But I'm pretty ignorant of a lot. I fuck up a lot. I'm trying to educate myself, sure, but when so much of that education comes from my own reading or stuff from the internet... it's pretty easy for it to seem disconnected from ~real life~. To have Proper Educator Types standing up in front of a hundred-something kids, talking about the kinds of things I'd read about and applying them to things I hadn't thought about was really affirming.
It helped that both lecturers were really charismatic in very different ways. The first guy was young - really young, like early thirties - who'd literally just got his PhD. He was chatty and casual (and pretty cute, not gonna lie). A few of my friends have taken his class further and are now facebook friends with him. His powerpoint presentations had marquees and sparkles and he'd occasionally forget he was lecturing at university and describe things as 'big fuck-off rocks' or whatever - and his lectures centred around the idea that political and social life is created by speech, or gossip. Political problems, or what we consider political problems as being created by talking about them, his specific examples being the panic about ~single-mothers~ in the late 80s-early 90s having real effects on real women, and the same thing happening now in the panic about women wearing religious headgear.
The other was an older woman, a total. badass. She'd swat people on the head if she caught them napping in class. She spoke really quickly and could never figure out how to show us the videos she'd picked out to illustrate certain points, so we'd get five emails a week with random youtube clips. She was merciless: her class was in biology, mostly reproductive biology, with a lot of emphasis on the evolution of how we see female reproductive organs (fun fact: once upon a time, when the uterus was considered a sort of invert of the penis, people believed that a woman who took long strides might gain herself a cock. It'd just fall right out of you). This meant a lot of pretty brutal description - I fainted in the lecture about the cultural meaning behind FGM. Apparently that happens in a lot of her classes. She'd also use a lot of anecdotes from her experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, adoption and motherhood.
I LOVE BOTH OF THESE LECTURERS SO MUCH. I came very close to changing my major, mostly because of them, and if I weren't so crap at the other parts of social anthropology I might have. But they're both up in the same category, so I can't.
And I thought fandom cagematches were bad. :(
The best lecturers I've had at university were for a subject I only took for one semester. They're equally responsible for me realising what I really OUGHT to be studying - sociology - and kicking myself for not picking a school that actually teaches it. Grumble grumble.
The class was sociology. It was all okay, you know, fairly interesting, whatever. Some fascinating stuff about how different cultures view what we think of as objective, physical features of the world - colour, space, time, that kind of thing - with just a tantalising hint of why my culture might think that.
The class was split into fortnight or three-week long chunks on different topics, with different professors coming in to lecture on something they specialise in. So it started with the physical reality thing, then a bit of kinship, then play behaviour, and it's all mildly interesting. But the two topics that blew me away were Discourse and Biology. This was the first time I'd ever been taught something from a explicitly feminist viewpoint. It was AWESOME. The thing is, I'm a pretty uneducated feminist - I call myself one because, you know, it seems obvious and instinctual that men and women are equal, that misogyny and patriarchy underly a lot of society and hurt a lot of people. But I'm pretty ignorant of a lot. I fuck up a lot. I'm trying to educate myself, sure, but when so much of that education comes from my own reading or stuff from the internet... it's pretty easy for it to seem disconnected from ~real life~. To have Proper Educator Types standing up in front of a hundred-something kids, talking about the kinds of things I'd read about and applying them to things I hadn't thought about was really affirming.
It helped that both lecturers were really charismatic in very different ways. The first guy was young - really young, like early thirties - who'd literally just got his PhD. He was chatty and casual (and pretty cute, not gonna lie). A few of my friends have taken his class further and are now facebook friends with him. His powerpoint presentations had marquees and sparkles and he'd occasionally forget he was lecturing at university and describe things as 'big fuck-off rocks' or whatever - and his lectures centred around the idea that political and social life is created by speech, or gossip. Political problems, or what we consider political problems as being created by talking about them, his specific examples being the panic about ~single-mothers~ in the late 80s-early 90s having real effects on real women, and the same thing happening now in the panic about women wearing religious headgear.
The other was an older woman, a total. badass. She'd swat people on the head if she caught them napping in class. She spoke really quickly and could never figure out how to show us the videos she'd picked out to illustrate certain points, so we'd get five emails a week with random youtube clips. She was merciless: her class was in biology, mostly reproductive biology, with a lot of emphasis on the evolution of how we see female reproductive organs (fun fact: once upon a time, when the uterus was considered a sort of invert of the penis, people believed that a woman who took long strides might gain herself a cock. It'd just fall right out of you). This meant a lot of pretty brutal description - I fainted in the lecture about the cultural meaning behind FGM. Apparently that happens in a lot of her classes. She'd also use a lot of anecdotes from her experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, adoption and motherhood.
I LOVE BOTH OF THESE LECTURERS SO MUCH. I came very close to changing my major, mostly because of them, and if I weren't so crap at the other parts of social anthropology I might have. But they're both up in the same category, so I can't.
And I thought fandom cagematches were bad. :(
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