There have been several times since January where I didn’t think I was going to survive this semester, where I wanted so desperately to quit. While everyone in my life was telling me I could do it, inside I was collapsing. Even with writing my thesis last semester, this one has been the most trying semester I’ve ever had.

Sociology of Developing Nations

I had this professor my first or second semester at PU and he rocked my socks off with his knowledge. I didn’t need this course to graduate but I wanted to have this professor one last time before I left. It was a full classroom; at the beginning of the semester one gal pleaded with him to let her sit on the floor so that she could enroll. There wasn’t much discussion, though, as the professor would write an “outline” of his lecture on the chalk board and then stand at the front, looking over our heads, throwing the contents of his brain at us.

I have my notes from my first class with him, where I used both sides of the sheets of paper and filled an entire spiral notebook. I took my laptop to class this time around and managed to get most of what he said. We focused on Central and South / Latin America and Africa, from colonial occupation to present (so much as there is a difference between then and now). A lot of what he said was brushed-off by most of my classmates, although he tried to connect it all to their daily lives (i.e., “Where was your shirt made?”).

His lecture format isn’t for everyone, but if you talk with him outside of the classroom, you’ll realize that he has so much information that he wants to pass on to you that you’ll be willing to sit through his 20-minute digressions on why socialized health care is better for everybody.

My only complaint with this course was our graduate teaching assistant, who was more concerned with being cool and hitting on the hot chicks in the class than actually grading our essay exams (“Just write your answers in bullet lists.”). He sucked.

Women and Work

There were 15 weeks in this semester excluding finals week. We only met 9 times.

Our grade consisted of 14 reading reactions (one paragraph summary, one paragraph our opinion on the reading), leading class discussion, and a final paper of five double-spaced pages. We had a course packet and a text, although we only discussed the packet readings. I stopped reading the text after the second week.

Our instructor was a full-out Marxist-Feminist, complete with class lectures on the bourgeoisie/proletariat conflict, how there really is class structure in the U-S-of-A, and how under capitalism labor always loses. She had been active in the labor/union movements of the 1960s and 1970s, worked as a factory laborer and unionized her follow workers, and came to academia in her 40s. Politically, this professor is awesome; pedagogically, not so awesome, but I’ve had her before and knew what to expect.

My classmates — oh my classmates! — consisted of two Feminist/Gender Studies (“women’s studies”) majors (me and another rad-fem, Kelly), a lot of management majors, two military dudes, and one British dude. She met a lot of resistance from the management folks (go figure!) and the one gal who would always say, “Wow! I, like, never thought of it that way! Wow! Like, at my job, we’re, like, paid an equal wage and stuff with, like, the men and stuff. Wow!” Or the one time we were talking about Wal-Mart and the British dude said, “Well, I’ve been researching Wal-Mart, and they’re actually a really great company to work for. They pay their employees really well.” To which I replied, “In what country are you talking about?” He looked at me blankly, “Wal-Mart is only located in the US.” I said, “Dude, you need to check your damn facts a little harder.”

It was a disgruntling and disheartening class for me.

The last day of class, our professor sort-of snapped. Someone made yet another naive comment about “things being so much better now than before” and our professor went on a 30-minute lecture/tirade on how the religious right has been slowly taking over the US government since before the 1980s, our culture has turned into a consumerist playground of individualist corporate-worshiping zombies, and how folks like us need to start paying attention to how capitalism is fucking us. It was quite a show — so much so that one gal got up and left in a huff in the middle of it.

Black Women Rising

In the beginning of the semester, our instructor was late to class almost every week for six weeks, one time being an hour late. One day she didn’t show up at all; it was only after we had sent someone to her office 15 minutes after the start of class that we learned class was cancelled.

The first day she handed us the syllabus, which only went through the second week. The third week class was cancelled and finally, by the fifth week, she gave us a syllabus that went up to spring break. Two weeks after spring break we received the remainder of the class schedule. Organizationally, it was awful and stressful for those of us who needed to know major assignments ahead of time.

While I think we met the course objectives, lacking was any sort of critical examination of culture and society. This course was more of an historical survey of prominent black women in US history. This is well and good, but what about today? What about the structures still in place that are oppressive and repressive (e.g., religion, education, the gender binary)? One of our texts was Patricia Hill Collins’ Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, so while we examined the key themes of Collins’ work, we didn’t connect it to our everyday lives or seek ways to make change. Perhaps as an introductory course it worked for some of my classmates, but for me it was a rehashing of “here’s how things have been, and here’s how things currently are”.

There also wasn’t a lot of class discussion. Most of the class time was spent looking at PowerPoint slides while the instructor lectured on the readings or attempted to get my classmates to understand the readings. I had expected more.

Music Appreciation

I cannot complain about this course enough to get it out of my system. I downright HATED this course.

We had a corporate textbook that came with a CD-ROM and 2 music CDs that cost over $100 and, if we had an additional $45 laying around, we could buy the 4 extra music CDs because even though the text only came with the first two, it covered music on the extra CDs and we went through all 48 fucking chapters. For the instructor, the corporate text came with pre-written PowerPoint slides for each chapter and of fucking course our instructor used those slides. The lectures were mind-numbing and by the middle of the semester the instructor magically lost the extra CDs and so stopped playing the music tracks in class altogether. He read to us the PP slides. Attendance was more-or-less required, because the instructor gave unannounced “quizzes” which counted toward our final grade. I say “quizzes” because he went over the questions right before he handed out the scantron forms (bubble sheets). I only took two of them and still managed to pass the class, so I ask you: what the fuck’s the point?

The exams were multiple-choice, true/false, and matching with listening sections and covered the most minute details. We were given the exam questions ahead of time, which meant we had to memorize four-to-six chapter’s worth of questions and puke it all up into the right bubble come exam time.

Fuck this course.

Queer Theory

I can say with all certainty this professor has been the most challenging of the semester, possibly of my entire undergraduate career. Not because she was hard to get along with or had insane course requirements, but because it was an upper 400-level course and she knows that means we should be competent enough to know how to handle theory and discourse.

Several of my classmates proved her wrong. One eventually stopped attending because she felt attacked every time she spoke (not by the professor, but by the rest of us). The six, sometimes seven of us who did speak in class, though, had great conversations and I came away with two great friends. Our reading load was heavy but manageable and for the most part engaging.

I went to the professor’s office hours and met with her over lunch, which can be both a good and bad thing. Good because we can talk about non-class related stuff and bad because it gives her an opportunity to get to know me and let me know what she thinks I’m capable of, which means there was no procrastinating in this class for me.

We had three papers and a final group paper and presentation. On the second paper I apparently wasn’t understanding the question I was to respond to, and she handed back my paper with a “see me after class” note. I met with her several times to hash out my thoughts, each time thinking I had gotten it only to say something not quite along the lines of what she was thinking and had to go back and re-write the damned thing. Even with talking with her I still got a B- on that damn paper. I didn’t have to write the third paper because she decided to let our groups decided to 1) write the third paper and have the final paper worth 30% of our final grade or 2) not write it and have the final paper be 50% of our grade; my group and I decided to take the second option because we’re insane.

When I was thinking about taking this course, I looked up the professor and found a syllabus from a year prior. For that semester, the final paper was an individual assignment and I was all excited about writing my own paper according to my own interests. Then I got to class and found out it would be a group project. I stayed in because it looked like it would prove to be a great class — and it was — but the project was stressful. I was in a group of three and our third person was not committed and rarely came to class. I was worried that she would write anything at all. I’ll just say that it is evident which section of the paper was written by her.

Besides the project, it was a class I looked forward to going to and one in which the professor expected the best from me.

Be ye not half-assed.

History of Love and Marriage

Although I had a bad experience with the Social Psychology of Marriage course, I decided to give this course a try. I’m glad I went for it.

We had a huge reading packet, but it didn’t seem like a lot as we worked through it. Class discussions were highly active and enjoyable (except for that time a gal said, “I don’t think we should question the government,” and spurred a heated debate) and unlike the previous marriage class, we actually were encouraged to question the institution. We looked at marriage and the family from colonial America to the present and examined not only het couples but all the forms relationships take in reality.

We only had two exams and a final paper; easy and sweet.

Media Studies

I had the same instructor for this class as for history of marriage, so it worked out well. The class title is actually “Gender and Multiculturalism”, but the instructor is a film studies (cultural criticism, perhaps) scholar so we examined mass media from a critical perspective. She’s a great instructor/teacher who just finished her doctorate and is moving on to a professorship at another university in the fall.

We had three minor papers and a final paper in which we examined a different cultural artifact (e.g., commercial, print ads, teevee shows) for each. Class discussions were a little sparse, as a lot of my classmates just didn’t give a damn about the influence of media and advertising on their lives. I still enjoyed the class, if only because I was able to research the Internet more.

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Not a bad last semester overall, but I’m still glad it’s over.