I have been feeling incredibly inarticulate lately, and today I am blaming it on the class I am taking. Well, I'm going to blame it explicitly on the reading for today's class. You see, this week I was a seminar leader, which meant I needed to have a close reading of the text and write a three page paper comparing and contrasting the text to other things we've read and to the greater themes of the class. Whatever, not too hard, right? Well, I despised this text. Truly, truly despised it. It was on multimodal discourse, which in itself isn't too bad. But it was a *very* academic theoretical 80 pages that I had to read. Lots of jargon that only obfuscated the point. It's like I saw the point, understood where and why it existed, and then I started reading and it totally confused me. It's like the reading took all my words of explanation away and I was left with a handful of jargon that I didn't know what to do with. And I didn't appreciate this. I'm used to being in a class and to be constantly talking about salient issues and making connections. I am making connections, but my words are gone. I open my mouth and marbles fall out. I think I'd make more sense if I resorted to grunts only. It's very frustrating and makes me angry. I thought reading was supposed to help you understand, not the other way round.
But I know I'm not a lost cause. Why? Well, I got out of class and all I wanted to do was talk. In it, I was pretty tongue-tied, which was awkward since I was supposed to be leading discussion. Out of it, I was abuzz with opinion and explanation of what we were talking about. Also, today we had a guest speaker, another professor in the program who teaches a course in the winter about old and new media. I was all over discussion. But then again, he was directly relating things to life, using some jargon, but not the ridiculous theoretical stuff. Maybe it's just the way the normal professor is leading discussion? Maybe I really should start taking ginko for my memory. Or have a cup of coffee right before class. Though as it is, I have a hard time getting to sleep after class. This much mental stimulation so close to bedtime makes it hard to get to sleep.
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