on the subject of academia
Nov. 30th, 2010 08:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tropiaveraLord, today.
In lieu of a thesis, my program has students take a seminar and complete a self-directed group project (group-directed?). I did mine this semester, and it has been...
Everyone in class has done a remarkable amount of work, and I think our finished product is interesting, but every one of the thirteen of us wants to strangle our professor. Her approach to giving feedback and advice has basically been, "Well, this is self-directed, but don't do that."
Today we did a dress rehearsal of our presentation, going a section at a time and then giving concrit. The chapter I was working on is the last one, so I get to see how the process is going to go for the other five. It was basically the class giving encouragement and some moderate concrit, and then our professor being like, yeah, it's okay, but this part is conceptually wrong, don't do that, or this is boring, you need to spice it up. I go up and talk for my eight minutes, get my suggestions for how to change the language, and then professor weighs in:
"You're going to need to redo all of this. Nothing here is going to work." And then sits watching me absorb that silently for another twenty seconds.
Haha, thanks! Fuck you too! She's so bluntly harsh about feedback that I wasn't even upset because it was SO OVER THE TOP. For the record, the things that didn't work: I spent too much time talking unnecessarily about a couple methodologies [which I wrote about for the chapter but did not mention once in the presentation]; needed to link it back to the other chapters [which I explicitly did at the beginning by discussing the rubrics of analysis the other groups used and how that affected our chapter's conception]; needed more maps. Oh, okay, sure! I can totally see how it was a complete failure then. For fuck's sake.
To her immense credit, one of my friends in class came in with "I think saying none of it worked was overstating it a bit, I think a lot of it worked, like..." and listed a couple parts, because she is awesome. We also spent about twenty minutes after class breaking it down, all "And then when she said that thing about the chapter one presentation?! OH MY GOD."
Two weeks!
In lieu of a thesis, my program has students take a seminar and complete a self-directed group project (group-directed?). I did mine this semester, and it has been...
Everyone in class has done a remarkable amount of work, and I think our finished product is interesting, but every one of the thirteen of us wants to strangle our professor. Her approach to giving feedback and advice has basically been, "Well, this is self-directed, but don't do that."
Today we did a dress rehearsal of our presentation, going a section at a time and then giving concrit. The chapter I was working on is the last one, so I get to see how the process is going to go for the other five. It was basically the class giving encouragement and some moderate concrit, and then our professor being like, yeah, it's okay, but this part is conceptually wrong, don't do that, or this is boring, you need to spice it up. I go up and talk for my eight minutes, get my suggestions for how to change the language, and then professor weighs in:
"You're going to need to redo all of this. Nothing here is going to work." And then sits watching me absorb that silently for another twenty seconds.
Haha, thanks! Fuck you too! She's so bluntly harsh about feedback that I wasn't even upset because it was SO OVER THE TOP. For the record, the things that didn't work: I spent too much time talking unnecessarily about a couple methodologies [which I wrote about for the chapter but did not mention once in the presentation]; needed to link it back to the other chapters [which I explicitly did at the beginning by discussing the rubrics of analysis the other groups used and how that affected our chapter's conception]; needed more maps. Oh, okay, sure! I can totally see how it was a complete failure then. For fuck's sake.
To her immense credit, one of my friends in class came in with "I think saying none of it worked was overstating it a bit, I think a lot of it worked, like..." and listed a couple parts, because she is awesome. We also spent about twenty minutes after class breaking it down, all "And then when she said that thing about the chapter one presentation?! OH MY GOD."
Two weeks!