A Girl With a Sword

the syllabus as art form

I just finished Special Topics in Calamity Physics. Here's my favorite passage from the book:

"I'm serious. Is there anything more glorious than a professor? Forget about molding the minds, the future of a nation--a dubious assertion; there's little you can do when they tend to emerge from the womb predestined for Grand Theft Auto Vice City. No. What I mean is, a professor is the only person on earth with the power to put a veritable frame around life--not the whole thing, God no--simply a fragment of it, a small wedge. He organizes the unorganizable. Nimbly partitions it into modern and postmodern, renaissance, baroque, primitivism, imperialism and so on. Splice that up with Research Papers, Vacation, Midterms. All that order--simply divine. The symmetry of a semester course. Consider the words themselves: the seminar, the tutorial, the advanced whatever workshop accessible only to seniors, to graduate fellows, to doctoral candidates, the practicum--what a marvelous word: practicum! You think me crazy. Consider a Kandinsky. Utterly muddled, put a frame around it, voila--looks rather quaint above the fireplace. And so it is with the curriculum. That celestial, sweet set of instructions, culminating in the scary wonder of the Final Exam. And what is the Final Exam? A test of one's deepest understanding of giant concepts. No wonder so many adults long to return to university, all those deadlines--ahh, that structure! Scaffolding to which we may cling! Even if it is arbitrary, without it, we're lost, wholly incapable of separating the Romantic from the Victorian in our sad, bewildering lives . . ."

The Table of Contents of the book is titled "Required Reading." The chapter titles are books, Wuthering Heights, Paradise Lost, Things Fall Apart. The book ends with a Final Exam. It's cute, but after awhile I started to wonder what the author was going for. It wasn't subtle, she was shining her flashlight of learning into all the readers' eyes and it felt just a little childish. Plus, she had long, obtuse metaphors and similes, usually allusions to things that were either completely obscure or that she had made up. The quirky writing style, though, reminded me a little of an episode of Gilmore Girls, once you get used to the way they talk it really starts to give you an adrenaline rush and it stops mattering that you're only getting a quarter of what they're saying.