My Freakin' Wonderful Life at UCCS

I'm frustrated with my classes this semester.
Really, really, terribly, awfully frustrated.

Since I transferred in late, I had a terrible selection, and all my classes are freshman level. It's demeaning enough for me, a junior, to have to take a full load of freshman classes, but these classes are even more rudimentary than the freshman classes at John Brown University. Essentially, I feel like I'm in high school again. At JBU, I was surrounded by so many brilliant people, especially in my English classes, but now I am once again plagued by pot-smokers who only love to party and get drunk and don't give a damn about learning anything. I do admit that I have met/observed a few genuinely intelligent people.

My English class proved especially difficult to stomach today. It's hard to take most days, since I've read about 80% of the course material in other courses taught by better professors. We are currently discussing poetry, and my professor introduced the concept of iambic pentameter to the class. Very few people were able to grasp it. She was not explaining it very well, and I had to resist the urge to jump to the front of the classroom and explain it myself.

Every class period, I have to listen to students explain their own theories and interpretations of an aspect of short story, novel, or poem, and I use a great amount of strength holding in my derisive laughter. Today, for example, we read a Keats poem, and a girl kept saying that she thought it was written to a secret lover because of one ambiguous line. My professor explained no less than three times that the poem was written for Keats' fiance, a well-documented fact. The poor girl would not let go of her tenuous argument, and she wasted at least ten minutes of class time attempting to support it.

Students in the class do not seem to know anything about literary theories, philosophy, or even common literary devices necessary to discuss literature intelligently. I base that last bitter comment only on what I have observed; I suspect that a few shy people in the class may know more than they let on. I kept wanting to point out a wonderful use of synecdoche is the Keats poem, but the girl with the 'secret lover' hypothesis would not pause long enough.

I like the professor, but I'm seeing more and more how inexperienced she is. Today she read one of Shakespeare's sonnets out loud, and she paused at the end of every line, whether they were end-stopped or enjambed! I couldn't believe that a professor with a doctorate did not know how to correctly read poetry! I was nearly overwhelmed with a desire to tear the book from her hands and read it aloud myself.

I had planned to begin a discussion on the effects of high-frequency vowel sounds in Dylan Thomas' villanelle "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night," but I decided that everyone in the class would be so lost that they would think I was an idiot. So I tried my best to tune everything out, and I actually made some progress writing a sonnet. I'm not trying to say that the class is full of idiots (although there are a few). Most of them are freshmen or have never taken an English literature class in college, so I really shouldn't be so hard on them. I can't picture myself ever being that green.

I could talk about how my cultural anthropology professor has us read 80 pages in one of our textbooks every week yet never lectures or tests us over it, but I'm tired, so I won't go into all the annoying stuff in my other classes. I hope that my classes next semester will be more challenging/interesting, otherwise . . . I'll continue to suffer in silence, with occasional blog-venting.