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Found 3 results

  1. It's that time of year again! School is starting at many learning institutions and now is the time to share your educational activities. I was supposed to graduate last semester, but wound up in the hospital and had to withdraw. I have to wait to take my needed spring classes again, so this is a free semester for me. I'm taking: First Year Spanish I Mechanics of Solids Linear Algebra Computer Science I Analytical Chemistry I'm also finishing my Principles of Bioengineering course that I took an incomplete in.
  2. Did I already start a thread about this? I can't find it, so I think I didn't, but maybe I did. If so, sorry. I recently started following a blog by this guy D.G. Myers, who's spent over twenty-five years teaching college English without tenure, and is losing his job because extending his contract would give him a claim on tenure. He's a passionate scholar who's also very articulate, so I think he's probably great at what he does; it's a shame he never got tenure. He's made a few posts about the sad state of academic English studies today, and how doomed his field surely is, because it's far too self-indulgent to be economically sustainable. Allowing for understandable bitterness, I think he probably still has a point. I wanted to be sympathetic, to argue that English departments were legitimate pillars of a university, at least in principle, and so some kind of sane reform could surely salvage the discipline. That's what I'd always felt, as someone who fell just short of minoring in English. But thinking more seriously about the academic study of English, with a few more decades of academic experience, I'm not sure I can buy my own argument. I still want to believe the conclusion. But I'm stuck on one point. Why should there be a university degree in fiction appreciation? Isn't that like getting a degree in gourmet dining? I mean, sure there's a lot to learn. I'm sure it takes a highly educated palate to savor all those truffles fully. But it's not a useful trade, to anyone. It's an indulgence. If rich people with time on their hands want to pay an expert instructor, to learn how to get more out of novels and recognize the really good ones, then fine: they can pay for private courses, just as they pay for courses in wine appreciation. But why should fiction appreciation be an academic discipline alongside medicine and engineering and natural science? I don't just mean that students need an education that will get them a paying job. I mean that education, that's worth supporting with public funds and recognizing with credentials, ought to enable people to make some positive contribution to the world, in the course of their lives. I'm not assuming that every student has to be driven by the lust for flat screen TVs and enormous vehicles. I'm talking about the moral obligation to try to do some good in the world, in the time that you have here. How is studying fiction appreciation going to help with that? I'm aware of the standard argument, that studying English trains one in reading comprehension, critical thinking, and articulate writing. Absolutely, it does — and those are awesome tools to train. I learned a lot about those things when I studied English, and I've valued that learning ever since. But here's the thing that someone else posted, on D.G. Myers's blog, and that struck me immediately as a knock-down point. Other disciplines train those same things, too. Comprehension, thinking, and writing are wonderful things, because they're critically useful everywhere. So every discipline has to train those things. And they do train them. They train them the same way studying English trains them: incidentally, in passing, while conveying something else as core content. But where other disciplines have core content that might someday make you useful to other people, the core content of English is fiction appreciation. So you can get more out of novels. What's up with that? What if English departments all switched over to studying non-fiction books and creative writing? Creative writing is a fine subject. As I said, my point here isn't just Philistinism. Fiction is valuable, because people value it. They pay for it. So training in creative writing would absolutely be a worthy peer to training in engineering. And a little bit of literary criticism might be appropriate to teach and research at university — as an adjunct to creative writing. But all this academic study devoted to fiction appreciation. Really. What's up with that?
  3. It's that time of year again: the fall semester is beginning at many universities (and secondary schools). What classes are you taking, or instructing? I am starting my senior year: Sustainable Energy Chemical Reactor Design Unit Operations Lab I Process Design, Economics, and Analysis Chemical Process Safety Separation Processes
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