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violetclmMonth-Late Blogging Part the First:
My previous classes update was in the Fall, and thus naturally didn't cover this most recent semester. Spring was my first semester that I spent the whole time in as a linguistics major, and accordingly I took two linguistics classes, as well as two others to fill various graduation requirements/hopefully have fun and learn neat stuff.
Finishing up some group requirement or other (I learn the letters when planning a courseload and then promptly forget them again), Tuesday and Thursday mornings were heir to Sociology of Science, almost certainly my worst class. I'll talk more about the Quest later, but suffice it to say that I frequently stayed up until past 3 am Tuesday mornings, which didn't work at all well with a 9 am class. I missed three or four class meetings, although one was only a film showing, and on a few other occasions was late due to waking up pretty much just as it was starting, grabbing some clean clothes, and rushing out the door. SocSci basically ended up being my "haven't shaved yet" class. It was not all that uncommon for me to trudge back up the hill to the dorm at 10:20, on the way passing many friends presumably off to their first classes and looking well-groomed and chipper (or in Weiqi's case frantic and chipper), and then fall asleep until lunch. The class required students to lead discussion (although the teacher wasn't very good at letting that happen, and was quite prone to leading it off in other directions herself) a few times, and while meeting before class with my coleaders for my first leading I developed an instant crush on one of the others, but later discovered that he was graduating entirely too soon for me to bother. Cute, though...my second leading went fine, and then my only partner for the third informed me at the last minute that he wasn't going to be participating, and while I got the discussion questions in more or less on time, I was really sick that day, and barely able to think, let alone lead a conference. I got a lot better about attendance for the second quarter after receiving a warning in my eight week comments.
The third main assignment of the class, besides leading a few discussions and writing weekly "memos" on the assigned material, was a research paper, due at the end of the semester with a proposal due just before spring break. Unfortunately, one of the days I missed class was the day that the teacher distributed the handout on how much information the proposal was to contain, how it should be formatted, when we were supposed to have an idea, etc., so I went into class that day having a topic area (the Bush compromise on stem cell research funding) but none of the detailed proposal work I was supposed to have. The teacher let me submit a late proposal, and I cobbled together a page or two basically saying "here are things I could talk about but I don't really know yet" at 3 am the day before I left for spring break at 5 am. To my credit, I'd done some initial reading and checked some books out of the library, all of which I did end up using and citing in the final paper.
This research paper was in every way a testament to my lacking time management skills. Every week I would plan to do some research or read through one of the books I'd checked out or something, and every week I'd work on some other project due sooner instead. Not even the day we didn't have class specifically so that people would spend the class/reading time working on their papers was so used. Out of an entire quarter, I spent the two or three days before the in-class paper presentation was due actually doing research and putting together said presentation, with the last few details (such as printing) decidedly just before running off to class. I thought longingly of my final paper at Middlebury in Literatur and how I'd actually rehearsed that presentation before giving it. Somehow I made it through the presentation (the teacher said something like "what do you have for us today, Sam?", subtly pointing out that I'd never once been to her office to discuss the project, which presumably everyone else had multiple times) and then the heat was off until the paper itself was due. I did not end up trying to interview Reed's on-sabbatical cellular biologist as had been discussed, but instead, after two painful days of trying to research and write the paper and finding no resolve within me, vomited all that I knew into word and wrote fifteen pages in twelve hours, just under the suggested 16-18 pages. I was less than impressed by my conclusion, which was wishy-washy and didn't follow entirely from the evidence, but the paper felt solid enough and I was moderately okay with it, minus everything about it prior to the point of its actual existence. I was not at all convinced I would pass the class, though, what with my other mistakes in it, and more importantly I felt thoroughly ashamed of myself. I thought back to my days at Cabrillo when I would do the assigned reading twice, once after the previous class and once the day it was due, always show up on time (although the buses helped with that), and sometimes get the highest score in the class. This sort of misbehavior is not something I can blame on Reed (or even the Quest) alone, and is absolutely something I'll need to improve next year.
On the bright side, the class was sometimes quite interesting. I did almost all the reading (though the last week proved impossible), actually participated a decent amount, asked people questions, presented interpretations of the reading, wrote most of the required memos, etc. I don't think the reading materials really gave me much in the way of answers, even though I hadn't known about the questions beforehand – perhaps that is a good thing? I went into the class expecting a History of science, and came out with a rather different bundle of knowledge that I'm not sure I'll actually be able to use for anything. And yet, some of the materials were fascinating! This is the odd puzzle of having a major, what role will the other stuff you're taking end up playing? If I am not careful I will sound like a hard science major in Hum110.
Far more in tune with stuff I actually have a background with was Robert Knapp's Shakespeare: Text and Performance, an amalgamation of the two or more Shakespeare classes that had originally been on the schedule for reasons I am unclear on. (I was originally signed up a different sociology class, that one with Marc Schneiberg, whom I had for Intro Soc, and who is an amazing teacher, but then the time-change from the Shakespeare changeup made that impossible.) Kaylee was also in the class, and, well, it was Kaylee, so I was very happy with that, even if she was basically mute during discussion. Rowan was there too, which was nice because I didn't really talk to him ever beforehand and now we're on somewhat good terms and he seems a decent fellow, as well as Dominic and a fascinating girl named Paulina whom I must sue to know better next year when I'm not all busy stressing out about finals and the Quest and therefore assuming I do not have the free time to get to know someone who lives (lived) in the very same dorm as me.
Anyway, the "Text" part of the class came in the form of reading Shakespeare plays – Richard III, Hamlet, Henry V, Lear, Othello, Much Ado, and Romeo and Juliet, in no particular order – and the "Performance" part came from us watching film adaptations every Monday of the texts we'd been reading. Then TTh we'd discuss the relation between the two and whether either text or performance could really be called the "play," and if so, which, and many other topics more specific to individual plays. It was generally really fun and there were a lot of very smart people in the class with a lot of cool ideas, plus Robert is amazing. Pancho Savery was the substitute teacher one day (while Nicola was visiting, so she didn't get a proper idea of the class), which was...interesting. Better than I expected. I no longer quite remember what we talked about that day – identity of some sort, in Hamlet – but I almost posted to the online Moodle about a later thought I had before forgetting about it. After all that stuff about SocSci, I'll refrain from discussing the three Shakespeare papers in any detail, but I will say that the last one was dashed off in a few hours between other finals because I just couldn't find any time for it while working on more urgent things. Also it kind of didn't exactly follow the assignment in that it didn't exactly focus on one or two scenes but rather an entire character. As a result, it was not at all well-done and I wouldn't wish reading it on anyone, which makes it all the worse that I turned it in to such a nice professor.
My first ever Linguistics course, as I have mentioned before, was Introduction to Syntax (or Introductory Syntax or something like that it doesn't matter) with Veronika in Spring '08, so a year later I returned to the topic in Advanced Topics in Syntax, taught by Joey from Morphosyntactic Typology in the Fall. He is an utterly delightful man who went to UCSC and entertains college students at his house with Belle and Sebastian and I shall miss him now that he's gone. (We still don't know who the new hire will be…?) Anyhow, even more than MST, I think, Advanced Syntax was a real taste of being a Linguistics major, for it was very small and quite personal, just six or eight of us sitting around a few tables arguing with just about everything Joey tried to teach us. We were absolutely not satisfied with Minimalism unless it explained absolutely everything that we had grown to know X-Bar theory to explain, even though it was just being introduced in passing as one possible answer to one single question. We all probably had our own styles of contribution – I sometimes asked for clarification, sometimes asked about seeming limitations of theories, sometimes presented new and radical (yet internally consistent) interpretations of the data, and in general bemoaned my utter inability to judge the grammaticality of English sentences.
Unless I'm forgetting something, the coursework (besides reading and active participation) consisted of two problem sets, a squib, and a final paper. A squib in Linguistics is not a person who can't do magic but rather a very short paper that need not present a conclusion but may just state a problem with an existing theory. The first problem set was on such things as the contrast between "the man with whom to dance" and "the man whom to dance with," the first of which supposedly being perfectly acceptable. I decided that this was an utterly arbitrary stipulation of English and as a result had not very much to say, and Joey commented that my writing was pretty short. To counteract this, I went on for ten pages for the second problem set, on alternate word orders in French, although admittedly three or four of those pages were just enormous sentence trees.
I spent quite some time thinking about what to write for the squib (the assignment, as for the final paper, was completely open-ended) and came up with twenty sentences, most featuring rightward extraposition of relative clauses ("a woman then shows up who despises Toto" and the like) which I had ten different Reed students rate on a 0-5 scale, then proposed (and developed) several different theories for what was going on for several pages, including predicting a few questionably-grammmatical sentences that one would predict. I was quite happy with it. I gave a similar level of forethought to the final, considering many different aspects of relative clauses within a certain theoretical framework, but kept either not coming up with real theses or discovering that someone else had already said all that. The final paper ended up being quite short, which was sad given how much I'd thought about the topic, but I could only pull one defensible and "new" idea from the lot. Also I wrote it in an extreme rush at the very end of finals week after turning in the final paper for Field Methods, or rather, I turned in that final paper, went to Lane, came back, and then wrote the syntax final. I think it's a clean argument – basically, when a noun has two different relative clauses after it and they're not coordinated with "and" or "but" or something, the second one is actually inside of the first one, contrary to the previous assumption within the afore-mentioned theoretical framework – but it's a bit of a pity that it was so short, really more like squib-length. I might have been able to work in non-restrictive relative clauses with a bit more time, but I hadn't fully developed that idea yet...either way, it was a fun class and a definite highlight of my week, it made me feel pretty smart and in the right major, and I hope Joey fares well in his future work.
My fourth and final class, with the most unusual meeting times, was Field Methods (of Linguistics) on Wednesday evenings for three hours a week. Field Methods sought to teach us the art of encountering a new language and learning about it by asking various questions of native speakers of the language (who would apparently know English). Our natives were a number of Reed students who spoke Nepali and who were compensated for their generous participation. The questions we asked them were generally "how do you say x" but eventually there was a fair bit of "is it okay to say x" using pre-constructed hopefully-Nepali examples. Wednesday evenings the whole class met together and interrogated one speaker, and the other five or so speakers had times during the week when we could schedule consultations with them and ask more specific questions.
We early on divided the class into three teams studying three separate aspects of Nepali: Phi studied phonology, Theta examined case and tense and aspect and various verbal modifiers, and Alpha tried to figure out the typology and syntax of questions and subordinate clauses. Alpha was a friend and I, and although we usually get along, I don't want to go into too much detail, but communication just didn't work too well in that class. We didn't talk too much about our theories, and when we did, we didn't achieve too much comprehension, so there were definitely days when we were pursuing totally different lines of interrogation with a speaker. We never completed one of the major assignments of the class. Our final paper was perhaps indicative of this as a whole, cobbled together at essentially the last minute by each of us independently and then not merged into a whole, singular report. I still don't really understand how it went so badly between us, especially as we interacted on other levels at other times and barely mentioned the class, although that could have been part of the problem itself, I suppose. I think I've kind of lost the skill of working well with others, to the extent I ever had it, and I should find a way to get it back somehow. I'll be a couple of really big classes next semester, so hopefully I'll decide to work on problem sets with friends, like we used to in Chemistry...it won't be quite the same, there's a big difference between developing a project through various means over the course of a semester and comparing ideas on different problem sets, but grooves are good things to get into.
Anyway, the reason I write so much, and particularly why I go into such detail on the specific assignments and how I at various times failed to meet specific expectations or generally did half-assed jobs, is that the other day I received in the mail a Commendation for Academic Excellence in 2008-2009 from the President's Office of Reed College. I've gotten one for both years now, and they mark a GPA for the year of 3.5 or higher. Reed doesn't generally tell you your grades directly unless you ask, but I speculate, and I'd been assuming a C at best for SocSci, a B for Shakespeare because of the ramshackleness of the papers, and maybe low-to-middle A's for the Ling courses potentially demotable a little for length or lack-of-cohesiveness issues. I imagine I did better the semester before, but even so a 3.5 seems a high number to have gotten up to, so this post is largely an attempt to answer: what did I do right? And for some classes, I'm still just not sure. All I know is that for some of those finals, particularly SocSci, I failed myself and the standards I hold myself to, and will definitely have to get better in that regard, even if Reed doesn't seem to mind.
My previous classes update was in the Fall, and thus naturally didn't cover this most recent semester. Spring was my first semester that I spent the whole time in as a linguistics major, and accordingly I took two linguistics classes, as well as two others to fill various graduation requirements/hopefully have fun and learn neat stuff.
Finishing up some group requirement or other (I learn the letters when planning a courseload and then promptly forget them again), Tuesday and Thursday mornings were heir to Sociology of Science, almost certainly my worst class. I'll talk more about the Quest later, but suffice it to say that I frequently stayed up until past 3 am Tuesday mornings, which didn't work at all well with a 9 am class. I missed three or four class meetings, although one was only a film showing, and on a few other occasions was late due to waking up pretty much just as it was starting, grabbing some clean clothes, and rushing out the door. SocSci basically ended up being my "haven't shaved yet" class. It was not all that uncommon for me to trudge back up the hill to the dorm at 10:20, on the way passing many friends presumably off to their first classes and looking well-groomed and chipper (or in Weiqi's case frantic and chipper), and then fall asleep until lunch. The class required students to lead discussion (although the teacher wasn't very good at letting that happen, and was quite prone to leading it off in other directions herself) a few times, and while meeting before class with my coleaders for my first leading I developed an instant crush on one of the others, but later discovered that he was graduating entirely too soon for me to bother. Cute, though...my second leading went fine, and then my only partner for the third informed me at the last minute that he wasn't going to be participating, and while I got the discussion questions in more or less on time, I was really sick that day, and barely able to think, let alone lead a conference. I got a lot better about attendance for the second quarter after receiving a warning in my eight week comments.
The third main assignment of the class, besides leading a few discussions and writing weekly "memos" on the assigned material, was a research paper, due at the end of the semester with a proposal due just before spring break. Unfortunately, one of the days I missed class was the day that the teacher distributed the handout on how much information the proposal was to contain, how it should be formatted, when we were supposed to have an idea, etc., so I went into class that day having a topic area (the Bush compromise on stem cell research funding) but none of the detailed proposal work I was supposed to have. The teacher let me submit a late proposal, and I cobbled together a page or two basically saying "here are things I could talk about but I don't really know yet" at 3 am the day before I left for spring break at 5 am. To my credit, I'd done some initial reading and checked some books out of the library, all of which I did end up using and citing in the final paper.
This research paper was in every way a testament to my lacking time management skills. Every week I would plan to do some research or read through one of the books I'd checked out or something, and every week I'd work on some other project due sooner instead. Not even the day we didn't have class specifically so that people would spend the class/reading time working on their papers was so used. Out of an entire quarter, I spent the two or three days before the in-class paper presentation was due actually doing research and putting together said presentation, with the last few details (such as printing) decidedly just before running off to class. I thought longingly of my final paper at Middlebury in Literatur and how I'd actually rehearsed that presentation before giving it. Somehow I made it through the presentation (the teacher said something like "what do you have for us today, Sam?", subtly pointing out that I'd never once been to her office to discuss the project, which presumably everyone else had multiple times) and then the heat was off until the paper itself was due. I did not end up trying to interview Reed's on-sabbatical cellular biologist as had been discussed, but instead, after two painful days of trying to research and write the paper and finding no resolve within me, vomited all that I knew into word and wrote fifteen pages in twelve hours, just under the suggested 16-18 pages. I was less than impressed by my conclusion, which was wishy-washy and didn't follow entirely from the evidence, but the paper felt solid enough and I was moderately okay with it, minus everything about it prior to the point of its actual existence. I was not at all convinced I would pass the class, though, what with my other mistakes in it, and more importantly I felt thoroughly ashamed of myself. I thought back to my days at Cabrillo when I would do the assigned reading twice, once after the previous class and once the day it was due, always show up on time (although the buses helped with that), and sometimes get the highest score in the class. This sort of misbehavior is not something I can blame on Reed (or even the Quest) alone, and is absolutely something I'll need to improve next year.
On the bright side, the class was sometimes quite interesting. I did almost all the reading (though the last week proved impossible), actually participated a decent amount, asked people questions, presented interpretations of the reading, wrote most of the required memos, etc. I don't think the reading materials really gave me much in the way of answers, even though I hadn't known about the questions beforehand – perhaps that is a good thing? I went into the class expecting a History of science, and came out with a rather different bundle of knowledge that I'm not sure I'll actually be able to use for anything. And yet, some of the materials were fascinating! This is the odd puzzle of having a major, what role will the other stuff you're taking end up playing? If I am not careful I will sound like a hard science major in Hum110.
Far more in tune with stuff I actually have a background with was Robert Knapp's Shakespeare: Text and Performance, an amalgamation of the two or more Shakespeare classes that had originally been on the schedule for reasons I am unclear on. (I was originally signed up a different sociology class, that one with Marc Schneiberg, whom I had for Intro Soc, and who is an amazing teacher, but then the time-change from the Shakespeare changeup made that impossible.) Kaylee was also in the class, and, well, it was Kaylee, so I was very happy with that, even if she was basically mute during discussion. Rowan was there too, which was nice because I didn't really talk to him ever beforehand and now we're on somewhat good terms and he seems a decent fellow, as well as Dominic and a fascinating girl named Paulina whom I must sue to know better next year when I'm not all busy stressing out about finals and the Quest and therefore assuming I do not have the free time to get to know someone who lives (lived) in the very same dorm as me.
Anyway, the "Text" part of the class came in the form of reading Shakespeare plays – Richard III, Hamlet, Henry V, Lear, Othello, Much Ado, and Romeo and Juliet, in no particular order – and the "Performance" part came from us watching film adaptations every Monday of the texts we'd been reading. Then TTh we'd discuss the relation between the two and whether either text or performance could really be called the "play," and if so, which, and many other topics more specific to individual plays. It was generally really fun and there were a lot of very smart people in the class with a lot of cool ideas, plus Robert is amazing. Pancho Savery was the substitute teacher one day (while Nicola was visiting, so she didn't get a proper idea of the class), which was...interesting. Better than I expected. I no longer quite remember what we talked about that day – identity of some sort, in Hamlet – but I almost posted to the online Moodle about a later thought I had before forgetting about it. After all that stuff about SocSci, I'll refrain from discussing the three Shakespeare papers in any detail, but I will say that the last one was dashed off in a few hours between other finals because I just couldn't find any time for it while working on more urgent things. Also it kind of didn't exactly follow the assignment in that it didn't exactly focus on one or two scenes but rather an entire character. As a result, it was not at all well-done and I wouldn't wish reading it on anyone, which makes it all the worse that I turned it in to such a nice professor.
My first ever Linguistics course, as I have mentioned before, was Introduction to Syntax (or Introductory Syntax or something like that it doesn't matter) with Veronika in Spring '08, so a year later I returned to the topic in Advanced Topics in Syntax, taught by Joey from Morphosyntactic Typology in the Fall. He is an utterly delightful man who went to UCSC and entertains college students at his house with Belle and Sebastian and I shall miss him now that he's gone. (We still don't know who the new hire will be…?) Anyhow, even more than MST, I think, Advanced Syntax was a real taste of being a Linguistics major, for it was very small and quite personal, just six or eight of us sitting around a few tables arguing with just about everything Joey tried to teach us. We were absolutely not satisfied with Minimalism unless it explained absolutely everything that we had grown to know X-Bar theory to explain, even though it was just being introduced in passing as one possible answer to one single question. We all probably had our own styles of contribution – I sometimes asked for clarification, sometimes asked about seeming limitations of theories, sometimes presented new and radical (yet internally consistent) interpretations of the data, and in general bemoaned my utter inability to judge the grammaticality of English sentences.
Unless I'm forgetting something, the coursework (besides reading and active participation) consisted of two problem sets, a squib, and a final paper. A squib in Linguistics is not a person who can't do magic but rather a very short paper that need not present a conclusion but may just state a problem with an existing theory. The first problem set was on such things as the contrast between "the man with whom to dance" and "the man whom to dance with," the first of which supposedly being perfectly acceptable. I decided that this was an utterly arbitrary stipulation of English and as a result had not very much to say, and Joey commented that my writing was pretty short. To counteract this, I went on for ten pages for the second problem set, on alternate word orders in French, although admittedly three or four of those pages were just enormous sentence trees.
I spent quite some time thinking about what to write for the squib (the assignment, as for the final paper, was completely open-ended) and came up with twenty sentences, most featuring rightward extraposition of relative clauses ("a woman then shows up who despises Toto" and the like) which I had ten different Reed students rate on a 0-5 scale, then proposed (and developed) several different theories for what was going on for several pages, including predicting a few questionably-grammmatical sentences that one would predict. I was quite happy with it. I gave a similar level of forethought to the final, considering many different aspects of relative clauses within a certain theoretical framework, but kept either not coming up with real theses or discovering that someone else had already said all that. The final paper ended up being quite short, which was sad given how much I'd thought about the topic, but I could only pull one defensible and "new" idea from the lot. Also I wrote it in an extreme rush at the very end of finals week after turning in the final paper for Field Methods, or rather, I turned in that final paper, went to Lane, came back, and then wrote the syntax final. I think it's a clean argument – basically, when a noun has two different relative clauses after it and they're not coordinated with "and" or "but" or something, the second one is actually inside of the first one, contrary to the previous assumption within the afore-mentioned theoretical framework – but it's a bit of a pity that it was so short, really more like squib-length. I might have been able to work in non-restrictive relative clauses with a bit more time, but I hadn't fully developed that idea yet...either way, it was a fun class and a definite highlight of my week, it made me feel pretty smart and in the right major, and I hope Joey fares well in his future work.
My fourth and final class, with the most unusual meeting times, was Field Methods (of Linguistics) on Wednesday evenings for three hours a week. Field Methods sought to teach us the art of encountering a new language and learning about it by asking various questions of native speakers of the language (who would apparently know English). Our natives were a number of Reed students who spoke Nepali and who were compensated for their generous participation. The questions we asked them were generally "how do you say x" but eventually there was a fair bit of "is it okay to say x" using pre-constructed hopefully-Nepali examples. Wednesday evenings the whole class met together and interrogated one speaker, and the other five or so speakers had times during the week when we could schedule consultations with them and ask more specific questions.
We early on divided the class into three teams studying three separate aspects of Nepali: Phi studied phonology, Theta examined case and tense and aspect and various verbal modifiers, and Alpha tried to figure out the typology and syntax of questions and subordinate clauses. Alpha was a friend and I, and although we usually get along, I don't want to go into too much detail, but communication just didn't work too well in that class. We didn't talk too much about our theories, and when we did, we didn't achieve too much comprehension, so there were definitely days when we were pursuing totally different lines of interrogation with a speaker. We never completed one of the major assignments of the class. Our final paper was perhaps indicative of this as a whole, cobbled together at essentially the last minute by each of us independently and then not merged into a whole, singular report. I still don't really understand how it went so badly between us, especially as we interacted on other levels at other times and barely mentioned the class, although that could have been part of the problem itself, I suppose. I think I've kind of lost the skill of working well with others, to the extent I ever had it, and I should find a way to get it back somehow. I'll be a couple of really big classes next semester, so hopefully I'll decide to work on problem sets with friends, like we used to in Chemistry...it won't be quite the same, there's a big difference between developing a project through various means over the course of a semester and comparing ideas on different problem sets, but grooves are good things to get into.
Anyway, the reason I write so much, and particularly why I go into such detail on the specific assignments and how I at various times failed to meet specific expectations or generally did half-assed jobs, is that the other day I received in the mail a Commendation for Academic Excellence in 2008-2009 from the President's Office of Reed College. I've gotten one for both years now, and they mark a GPA for the year of 3.5 or higher. Reed doesn't generally tell you your grades directly unless you ask, but I speculate, and I'd been assuming a C at best for SocSci, a B for Shakespeare because of the ramshackleness of the papers, and maybe low-to-middle A's for the Ling courses potentially demotable a little for length or lack-of-cohesiveness issues. I imagine I did better the semester before, but even so a 3.5 seems a high number to have gotten up to, so this post is largely an attempt to answer: what did I do right? And for some classes, I'm still just not sure. All I know is that for some of those finals, particularly SocSci, I failed myself and the standards I hold myself to, and will definitely have to get better in that regard, even if Reed doesn't seem to mind.