Snark-Academia

I do apologize for the lax blogging of late, but 1. I moved apartments, and 2. my 6 year old IBM crashed its poor harddrive, so I've been sans computer for 2 weeks. Which was a bit liberating, actually--I checked my email a lot less and spent more time reading actual books, but I'm glad to have it back.

In the meantime, I had a few academic run-ins that were both amusing and slightly scary, and so will share them with you now.

Case 1: I had my Arabic midterm 1 1/2 weeks ago, and prior to that a friend and I were studying by making up sentences, which became slightly ridiculous sentences as we were trying to practice plurals and indefinite vs definite nouns. So sentences like "we used to listen to music in elementary schools" or "I lived in a large house with Arabs." We came up with a few questions, so I emailed them to my professor, who is a Phd student whom I am on good terms with. Now, some of these questions I definitely knew the answer to, but for some reason I either panicked or blanked on them the night before the test. This is what he sent back:

"DO NOT PANIC. DO NOT SECOND GUESS YOURSELVES.

I think you guys have learned an awful lot in a short period of time and you are not sure if you know what you are doing. Go back over your homeworks and quizzes and assess yourself. You will see that you DO know what you are doing. To answer your questions...

1. You have only learned to use كل before a definite noun, roughly meaning "all..." you have SEEN it used before indefinite, but have not been drilled on it. so don't try to learn it now.

2. when will you ever need to say "we listen to music in elementary schools" vs "we listen to music in THE elementary schools?"

3. You have not been taught to use ان between verbs. So don't use it. You will shoot your eye out.
4. Arabs are arabs until they are THE arabs.

5. I won't even...!@#

But seriously, these have become philosophical questions. If you are still not satisfied, just spend the rest of the night and morning memorizing the following ridiculous sentence:

كنت اسكن في بيت كبير مع عرب ولكن الان هم يستمعون الى موسقى كل اليوم في مدارس ابتدائية .

I used to live in a big house with Arabs but now they listen to music all day in elementary schools.

*smirky laugh*

elijah
let me know if you have any more questions...i'm enjoying your panic attacks :) jk"

Oh, and if you notice the plurals above, it is because he sent this to the WHOLE CLASS. Because as he told me later, "if the others saw that you were freaking out [I interjected, "I WAS NOT FREAKING OUT"], I figured it would make them realize you were all in the same boat." My response was:

"Thanks for sending this to everyone! ;) have a great night, y'all.
ps for your information I plan to use ALL of these sentences all the time, everywhere, on every quiz, forever. jiim kaaf!"

I proceeded to memorize the sentence:

كنت اسكن في بيت كبير مع عرب ولكن الان هم يستمعون الى موسقى كل اليوم في مدارس ابتدائية .

(I used to live in a big house with Arabs but now they listen to music all day in elementary schools.) And the next day on the test, we had to write a paragraph about ourselves. Being a slight smart-aleck when the mood strikes me, my paragraph began, "I used to live in a big house with Arabs but now I live in Bloomington. My parents work in Jamestown and now they listen to music all day in elementary schools." He drew a smiley face next to it. I got a 96% on that midterm.

Case 2: Slightly less-positive but more expected, I got back feedback on my seminar paper from last semester--my professor has been out of the country and just scanned us her comments. My comments start off with:

"First, with regards to language, your sentence structures and word choices are weak; the switches of topics and paragraphs are abrupt; your prose is neither crisp nor energetic; and your syntax is wobbly."

And it just got worse from there: my reasoning was fallacious, my source-citing egregious, and my overall approach laconic. An 18 page paper and no positive comments to be found, and she wrote all over it, which included crossing out entire paragraphs. I really appreciate the time it must have taken to write all those comments, I agree with a lot of her points, and I wasn't overly proud of this paper, but as this is a professor who referred to "clouds" in one of her articles as "aerial cumuli" I suspect that we might have a difference of opinion in certain areas. Still and all, though--I've been wanting more constructive criticism, and I've got it!