the one who stumbled (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
floorpigeon) wrote2011-03-14 12:13 am
floorpigeon) wrote2011-03-14 12:13 am
(no subject)
Seeing today's xkcd and having just finished a math class, I have to wonder if I'm one of those people with a Math Crush. Like, it's no wonder: I typically enjoy things which freak me out and seem alien and difficult to encompass... or something.....
I think I'm crushing on... mathematics... because it's so icy and unavailable... and goes so well with fairy-tales..... *headdesk* I've evolved, you see, way past the intermediate stage of crushing on imaginary people, straight to disciplines and categories of knowledge (as long as they seem to reject me). It's only logical.
A corollary of this is that I keep doubting the worth of the stuff I'm excited about, like studying the Romantic poets and reading Milton, Bronte and Goethe this spring and and stuff.
Abstractly, I know that it would enrich me and is relevant to my interests, but after a quarter of physics, programming & math (and panicking at all but physics), it's hard to escape a deep sense of dissatisfaction with more... subjective/historical study, even if analytical. Like, a part of me wonders if it's worthwhile to learn the humanities at school. It feels like blasphemy when I say it, but there it is. It probably didn't help that I just finished one humanities program which was focused on freshman composition and introductory analysis (though I enjoyed the readings) and a poetics course that was 90% bullshit and 10% Marxism (plus extra 2% modern political discourse), though I enjoyed the opportunity to finish my H/D fic, I guess. My poetics course started out seriously analytical, but after we stopped reading actual philosophical/textual analysis and started reading stuff random activists wrote on Current Issues, I just got frustrated. I never really felt I got a grounding in hard-core criticism. And I get frustrated with people not being ready for honest hard-core critique of their work, too.
If I can't challenge myself sufficiently this spring quarter with my Romantics project, I don't know if I can justify continuing with my humanities degree. Which is (like I said) ridiculous, but that's how I currently feel. The only humanities I really want to a part of is going to have to be as rigorous as the sciences, just in a different sphere. I don't even know if that's possible in a non-interdisciplinary way (like, philosophy can't exist properly without science, say). I guess I just really like learning entirely new things, rather than simply new(ish) approaches to old(ish) things I've already thought about. There's a universe of difference (in that regard) in reading Marx, say, from an introduction to kinematics or neural networks or chaos theory, etc.
I feel like so much of what I do in humanities/English classes is just sharpening and focusing skills/ideas I already possess. How do I break out of that sort of rut? I rarely feel like I discover things the way I do in a physics or programming class. I don't feel forced to think logically-- I mean, it's encouraged but not required in the humanities I've had so far. The main benefit seems to be from simply broadening my erudition (reading more of the English Canon) and sharpening skills I already possess, as I said. The secondary benefit of growing through intense conversation with other minds is rare. That is to say, people say interesting things, but the level of discourse that would be truly meaningful to my growth is very rare. If I were in a class with 100% engaged advanced students, maybe it'd be different. Or not.
I guess ultimately I realize that the sciences have equal or greater potential to seem 'old' and/or 'pointless' or 'empty'. I've had enough bad math classes to know all about how to make it seem not worth trying. Part of it's that I'm at Evergreen, which doesn't exactly have super-high standards on the bullshit-o-meter in learning. Just as humanities may seem too 'fuzzy' and irrelevant, so science may seem too dry and 'application-fixated'. Partly it's just inherent personality mismatch: I'm a generalist and a person who likes to approach things both holistically and analytically. I want a systems-eye-view, metaphors included. I want to see how knowledge is both abstractly based and formed and shown in many permutations and disciplines. I am deeply frustrated with the idea of being stuck in either the sciences or the humanities. This sort of cross-sectional yearning is why I'm *at* an interdisciplinary school like Evergreen, but so far I haven't really been able to make the edges meet.
I do think I have more to learn, just in English alone-- in terms of tightness, analysis and focus in composition and in terms of sheer erudition (I've still only read one of Shakespeare's plays!). The reason I took the fuzzy poetics class is that I did think I had more to learn in terms of lit-crit also. I'm not against the ideas being played with (Marxism, queer theory, whatever), but I am not willing to simply accept them or see them predominantly on ethical or social terms. When it comes to social systems, I generally just want to understand as abstractly/unbiased as possible.
I think Evergreen just doesn't have many programs that mix up the humanities and the sciences in ways I find satisfactory; there's one next year, but it's only for freshmen and intended as a foundation/survey course, not an instrumental approach. Sometimes it's just that it requires more math than I have so far, and sometimes the science is too 'fuzzy' (phrases like 'the philosophy of science' make me twitch in traumatic response). We did read a play in my physics program, and I wrote a story, so it's been the most interdisciplinary one so far. I think I'm being more critical than is warranted in some ways, probably. The truth is, I just haven't taken enough science, and it sucks.
I don't know.
If anyone can defend a humanities education to me-- not in principle, but to me-- as opposed to a further battle with science (because I can only take one program at a time in my school)-- I'm all ears.
I think I'm crushing on... mathematics... because it's so icy and unavailable... and goes so well with fairy-tales..... *headdesk* I've evolved, you see, way past the intermediate stage of crushing on imaginary people, straight to disciplines and categories of knowledge (as long as they seem to reject me). It's only logical.
A corollary of this is that I keep doubting the worth of the stuff I'm excited about, like studying the Romantic poets and reading Milton, Bronte and Goethe this spring and and stuff.
Abstractly, I know that it would enrich me and is relevant to my interests, but after a quarter of physics, programming & math (and panicking at all but physics), it's hard to escape a deep sense of dissatisfaction with more... subjective/historical study, even if analytical. Like, a part of me wonders if it's worthwhile to learn the humanities at school. It feels like blasphemy when I say it, but there it is. It probably didn't help that I just finished one humanities program which was focused on freshman composition and introductory analysis (though I enjoyed the readings) and a poetics course that was 90% bullshit and 10% Marxism (plus extra 2% modern political discourse), though I enjoyed the opportunity to finish my H/D fic, I guess. My poetics course started out seriously analytical, but after we stopped reading actual philosophical/textual analysis and started reading stuff random activists wrote on Current Issues, I just got frustrated. I never really felt I got a grounding in hard-core criticism. And I get frustrated with people not being ready for honest hard-core critique of their work, too.
If I can't challenge myself sufficiently this spring quarter with my Romantics project, I don't know if I can justify continuing with my humanities degree. Which is (like I said) ridiculous, but that's how I currently feel. The only humanities I really want to a part of is going to have to be as rigorous as the sciences, just in a different sphere. I don't even know if that's possible in a non-interdisciplinary way (like, philosophy can't exist properly without science, say). I guess I just really like learning entirely new things, rather than simply new(ish) approaches to old(ish) things I've already thought about. There's a universe of difference (in that regard) in reading Marx, say, from an introduction to kinematics or neural networks or chaos theory, etc.
I feel like so much of what I do in humanities/English classes is just sharpening and focusing skills/ideas I already possess. How do I break out of that sort of rut? I rarely feel like I discover things the way I do in a physics or programming class. I don't feel forced to think logically-- I mean, it's encouraged but not required in the humanities I've had so far. The main benefit seems to be from simply broadening my erudition (reading more of the English Canon) and sharpening skills I already possess, as I said. The secondary benefit of growing through intense conversation with other minds is rare. That is to say, people say interesting things, but the level of discourse that would be truly meaningful to my growth is very rare. If I were in a class with 100% engaged advanced students, maybe it'd be different. Or not.
I guess ultimately I realize that the sciences have equal or greater potential to seem 'old' and/or 'pointless' or 'empty'. I've had enough bad math classes to know all about how to make it seem not worth trying. Part of it's that I'm at Evergreen, which doesn't exactly have super-high standards on the bullshit-o-meter in learning. Just as humanities may seem too 'fuzzy' and irrelevant, so science may seem too dry and 'application-fixated'. Partly it's just inherent personality mismatch: I'm a generalist and a person who likes to approach things both holistically and analytically. I want a systems-eye-view, metaphors included. I want to see how knowledge is both abstractly based and formed and shown in many permutations and disciplines. I am deeply frustrated with the idea of being stuck in either the sciences or the humanities. This sort of cross-sectional yearning is why I'm *at* an interdisciplinary school like Evergreen, but so far I haven't really been able to make the edges meet.
I do think I have more to learn, just in English alone-- in terms of tightness, analysis and focus in composition and in terms of sheer erudition (I've still only read one of Shakespeare's plays!). The reason I took the fuzzy poetics class is that I did think I had more to learn in terms of lit-crit also. I'm not against the ideas being played with (Marxism, queer theory, whatever), but I am not willing to simply accept them or see them predominantly on ethical or social terms. When it comes to social systems, I generally just want to understand as abstractly/unbiased as possible.
I think Evergreen just doesn't have many programs that mix up the humanities and the sciences in ways I find satisfactory; there's one next year, but it's only for freshmen and intended as a foundation/survey course, not an instrumental approach. Sometimes it's just that it requires more math than I have so far, and sometimes the science is too 'fuzzy' (phrases like 'the philosophy of science' make me twitch in traumatic response). We did read a play in my physics program, and I wrote a story, so it's been the most interdisciplinary one so far. I think I'm being more critical than is warranted in some ways, probably. The truth is, I just haven't taken enough science, and it sucks.
I don't know.
If anyone can defend a humanities education to me-- not in principle, but to me-- as opposed to a further battle with science (because I can only take one program at a time in my school)-- I'm all ears.
no subject
But I guess I'm also for some of the less navel-gaze-y/bs humanities too, like history, languages, things that overlap with social sciences etc. Maybe I'm forgetting, but I don't remember hearing about a history class?
no subject
I guess I was saying 'humanities' when I mean lit. It's lit I want to beat over the head with a blunt object in frustration. >___>; That 'Trangressive Bodies' class was -really- not what I needed, I guess.. :>