(Re)reading for Oct/Nov
Dec. 1st, 2020 09:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnOctober: (aside from finally finishing the Oster Wilhelmine bio for fandom, and Yuletide canon review)
-Le Petit Prince, read in French and (reread in) English to anticipate French-reading-group someday in the near future. If I had stayed at my first high school (with Awesome French Teacher) I would have read it as part of the third-year French curriculum (which is probably why I have my copy at all); as it was, this was the first time I'd read it in French. I have read that book enough times in English that for large portions of it I barely had to consult the translation. (Hmm, maybe I should try this for The Dark Is Rising series; I bet I also have large swathes of those books all but memorized.) This book is -- well, it's about a lot of things (and, okay, I gotta confess that the Prince/rose relationship is not my favorite), but at its heart it's about love and about grief, and about how love and grief are entwined. I think I saw some of that, dimly, as a child, but I didn't understand it, and I wouldn't have been able to articulate it at all. I love this book so much.
-Emily of New Moon, Emily Climbs, Emily's Quest - Another reread. It struck me on this reread that Dean Priest is really skeevy, which apparently I'd failed to wholly pick up as a kid -- that is, I never liked him much, and I definitely never forgave him for what he said about Emily's book, but I don't remember actually recoiling from the page like I did this time. Like, he meets Emily when she's... thirteen? twelve? He was a FRIEND OF HER FATHER'S. And he says -- this is a literal quote -- "I think I'll wait for you." (And he, of course, does.) AUGH.
The perennial question for Emily's Quest is, who do you ship Emily with? (Which in and of itself tells you why it's my least favorite of the three.) In that elementary-to-high-school-ish period, I shipped a lot of people in various books -- Will/Jane in The Dark is Rising was always my ship, I was firmly on the side of Jo/Bhaer at the time -- I think this may have been my first experience with a book where I never did ship Emily with anyone in the book, really. She ends up with Teddy, but he's pretty... boring and just not that great. Perry isn't boring and I like him rather better than Teddy, but Emily just seems so uninterested in him! (Of course, an AU would be interesting...) Dean is Right Out, of course.
November: my concentration, attention span, and available time are pretty much totally shot until... Christmas :P But I did a lot of rereading, at least.
-Uhura's Song (Kagan) - I'd forgotten how good this is, how good the worldbuilding is and how much I adore that a large part of the conflict and plot devices have to do with interpersonal and cultural relations, including music <3 It actually impressed me more on this reread than when I first read it (though I obviously liked it when I first read it as well). Though... maybe this year was not the right time to reread a book about a plague... that jumps from one species to another and has a really long incubation period that allows it to spread rapidly out of quarantine... and which hits some people much harder than others... which all would have been okay with me except that pretty much everyone in the book basically is trying their hardest to help even when it conflicts with their cultural preferences, and that just kinda made me upset. (Not at the book, obviously; the book was great!) Also, Dr. Evan Wilson and Spock are the best! Anyway, maybe I should reread Hellspark.
-The Gift of Wings - 3+/5. The one book that wasn't a reread was this bio of L.M. Montgomery which was really interesting! The author had edited Montgomery's journals and relied heavily on them, but not solely -- she also pointed out that on one hand the journals were snapshots so might not be a complete picture, and on the other hand Montgomery actually edited the journals, so she had a conscious story she was trying to tell.
I'd known before that Montgomery's husband suffered from depression and that her journals often painted a bleak picture, but it was interesting to read about how her life went. Her husband seems to have had more good points than I'd previously been aware of (he was kind and low-key), but certainly depression and over-medication took their toll, along with probably some feelings of inferiority. Apparently Montgomery carries on the tradition of women writers writing perceptively about wonderful families but whose children feel... rather more ambiguously... about their mothers :P Though in Montgomery's case at least she didn't write her kids into her books as angelic boys who never grew up, so there's that. One of her two children turned out really well and the other seems to have had a good deal of difficulty both in relating to people and in impulse control, leading him to get into a great deal of trouble as a child, adolescent, and adult; of course at this remove it's hard to tell whether it was undiagnosed/untreated ASD/ADHD or something else (and the author does not speculate on this), but it does seem to have been something present his whole life.
The author also makes a good case (as far as I can tell) that both Montgomery and her husband were suffering from over-medication and severe medication side effects for much of their later lives. Also I did not know before reading this that there is something of a case to be made that Montgomery committed suicide; the author does not herself think it was suicide, but sets forth why the various parties involved thought it was.
I should say that there are certainly times when the author gets caught up in her own theories. There's a random guy who shows up in one of the chapters who she tries her best to convince us was very important to Montgomery, the evidence being... that... he doesn't show up in the diaries very much?? Yeah, I didn't buy it either :P (That he may have made it into one of her books as part of a love interest's character, sure! Why not? But that doesn't mean anything.)
-Rainbow Valley and Rilla of Ingleside (L.M. Montgomery) - Reading the bio made me interested in reading these later Anne books (though I did not succeed in reading the earlier Anne books). Rilla particularly, as Montgomery meant it as an adult book about World War I rather than a kid's book (although of course I read it as a child). I am also shocked that Rilla was written before Rainbow, because the two books go together so perfectly.
I was not expecting to basically cry all the way through Rilla. I don't think I would have reading it any other year, but it just struck me, how at first everything's normal and gradually (though very quickly) it becomes very obvious that WWI is very serious. And of course all the men going off to fight -- but it's not their story. It's the story of the women staying home and doing the best they can and having to deal with all kinds of things that they would probably not have had to deal with if they hadn't happened to live during a world war, and also all the uncertainty; having to wait and not knowing how long it was going to last, and all the little sacrifices that don't seem very big compared to what people on the front lines are going through and in fact really aren't compared to that, but which are still sacrifices. It hit me pretty hard, anyway, reading it at this moment in time.
Interestingly, I'd always liked the Emily books more than the Anne books, but this reread I think I like the later Anne books best. Perhaps because they were written later in Montgomery's life and now I'm older?
-Darkspell (Kerr) - I have this problem with Kerr's Deverry books that Darkspell always starts off so enticingly, and Jill is my fave, and I'm burning through the pages and am like "hey, this time maybe I'll read the series through!" and then by halfway through Daggerspell I'm kind of like, well, that was worth reading through, I guess, but I don't really feel like reading any further. On this reread, it was interesting to see how much Kerr sees that women are trapped in their lives, which I don't think I picked up as a kid. (I mean, it's pretty blatant! I was just really not observant.)
-Le Petit Prince, read in French and (reread in) English to anticipate French-reading-group someday in the near future. If I had stayed at my first high school (with Awesome French Teacher) I would have read it as part of the third-year French curriculum (which is probably why I have my copy at all); as it was, this was the first time I'd read it in French. I have read that book enough times in English that for large portions of it I barely had to consult the translation. (Hmm, maybe I should try this for The Dark Is Rising series; I bet I also have large swathes of those books all but memorized.) This book is -- well, it's about a lot of things (and, okay, I gotta confess that the Prince/rose relationship is not my favorite), but at its heart it's about love and about grief, and about how love and grief are entwined. I think I saw some of that, dimly, as a child, but I didn't understand it, and I wouldn't have been able to articulate it at all. I love this book so much.
So the little prince tamed the fox. And when the hour of his departure drew near--One reads that and it's immediately clear... this guy knows.
"Ah," said the fox, "I shall cry."
"It is your own fault," said the little prince. "I never wished you any sort of harm; but you wanted me to tame you . . ."
"Yes, that is so," said the fox.
"But now you are going to cry!" said the little prince.
"Yes, that is so," said the fox.
"Then it has done you no good at all!"
"It has done me good," said the fox, "because of the color of the wheat fields."
-Emily of New Moon, Emily Climbs, Emily's Quest - Another reread. It struck me on this reread that Dean Priest is really skeevy, which apparently I'd failed to wholly pick up as a kid -- that is, I never liked him much, and I definitely never forgave him for what he said about Emily's book, but I don't remember actually recoiling from the page like I did this time. Like, he meets Emily when she's... thirteen? twelve? He was a FRIEND OF HER FATHER'S. And he says -- this is a literal quote -- "I think I'll wait for you." (And he, of course, does.) AUGH.
The perennial question for Emily's Quest is, who do you ship Emily with? (Which in and of itself tells you why it's my least favorite of the three.) In that elementary-to-high-school-ish period, I shipped a lot of people in various books -- Will/Jane in The Dark is Rising was always my ship, I was firmly on the side of Jo/Bhaer at the time -- I think this may have been my first experience with a book where I never did ship Emily with anyone in the book, really. She ends up with Teddy, but he's pretty... boring and just not that great. Perry isn't boring and I like him rather better than Teddy, but Emily just seems so uninterested in him! (Of course, an AU would be interesting...) Dean is Right Out, of course.
November: my concentration, attention span, and available time are pretty much totally shot until... Christmas :P But I did a lot of rereading, at least.
-Uhura's Song (Kagan) - I'd forgotten how good this is, how good the worldbuilding is and how much I adore that a large part of the conflict and plot devices have to do with interpersonal and cultural relations, including music <3 It actually impressed me more on this reread than when I first read it (though I obviously liked it when I first read it as well). Though... maybe this year was not the right time to reread a book about a plague... that jumps from one species to another and has a really long incubation period that allows it to spread rapidly out of quarantine... and which hits some people much harder than others... which all would have been okay with me except that pretty much everyone in the book basically is trying their hardest to help even when it conflicts with their cultural preferences, and that just kinda made me upset. (Not at the book, obviously; the book was great!) Also, Dr. Evan Wilson and Spock are the best! Anyway, maybe I should reread Hellspark.
-The Gift of Wings - 3+/5. The one book that wasn't a reread was this bio of L.M. Montgomery which was really interesting! The author had edited Montgomery's journals and relied heavily on them, but not solely -- she also pointed out that on one hand the journals were snapshots so might not be a complete picture, and on the other hand Montgomery actually edited the journals, so she had a conscious story she was trying to tell.
I'd known before that Montgomery's husband suffered from depression and that her journals often painted a bleak picture, but it was interesting to read about how her life went. Her husband seems to have had more good points than I'd previously been aware of (he was kind and low-key), but certainly depression and over-medication took their toll, along with probably some feelings of inferiority. Apparently Montgomery carries on the tradition of women writers writing perceptively about wonderful families but whose children feel... rather more ambiguously... about their mothers :P Though in Montgomery's case at least she didn't write her kids into her books as angelic boys who never grew up, so there's that. One of her two children turned out really well and the other seems to have had a good deal of difficulty both in relating to people and in impulse control, leading him to get into a great deal of trouble as a child, adolescent, and adult; of course at this remove it's hard to tell whether it was undiagnosed/untreated ASD/ADHD or something else (and the author does not speculate on this), but it does seem to have been something present his whole life.
The author also makes a good case (as far as I can tell) that both Montgomery and her husband were suffering from over-medication and severe medication side effects for much of their later lives. Also I did not know before reading this that there is something of a case to be made that Montgomery committed suicide; the author does not herself think it was suicide, but sets forth why the various parties involved thought it was.
I should say that there are certainly times when the author gets caught up in her own theories. There's a random guy who shows up in one of the chapters who she tries her best to convince us was very important to Montgomery, the evidence being... that... he doesn't show up in the diaries very much?? Yeah, I didn't buy it either :P (That he may have made it into one of her books as part of a love interest's character, sure! Why not? But that doesn't mean anything.)
-Rainbow Valley and Rilla of Ingleside (L.M. Montgomery) - Reading the bio made me interested in reading these later Anne books (though I did not succeed in reading the earlier Anne books). Rilla particularly, as Montgomery meant it as an adult book about World War I rather than a kid's book (although of course I read it as a child). I am also shocked that Rilla was written before Rainbow, because the two books go together so perfectly.
I was not expecting to basically cry all the way through Rilla. I don't think I would have reading it any other year, but it just struck me, how at first everything's normal and gradually (though very quickly) it becomes very obvious that WWI is very serious. And of course all the men going off to fight -- but it's not their story. It's the story of the women staying home and doing the best they can and having to deal with all kinds of things that they would probably not have had to deal with if they hadn't happened to live during a world war, and also all the uncertainty; having to wait and not knowing how long it was going to last, and all the little sacrifices that don't seem very big compared to what people on the front lines are going through and in fact really aren't compared to that, but which are still sacrifices. It hit me pretty hard, anyway, reading it at this moment in time.
Interestingly, I'd always liked the Emily books more than the Anne books, but this reread I think I like the later Anne books best. Perhaps because they were written later in Montgomery's life and now I'm older?
-Darkspell (Kerr) - I have this problem with Kerr's Deverry books that Darkspell always starts off so enticingly, and Jill is my fave, and I'm burning through the pages and am like "hey, this time maybe I'll read the series through!" and then by halfway through Daggerspell I'm kind of like, well, that was worth reading through, I guess, but I don't really feel like reading any further. On this reread, it was interesting to see how much Kerr sees that women are trapped in their lives, which I don't think I picked up as a kid. (I mean, it's pretty blatant! I was just really not observant.)
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Date: 2020-12-02 06:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-03 04:36 am (UTC)Yes, that passage <3
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Date: 2020-12-02 06:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-03 04:39 am (UTC)I remember liking Hellspark but not all that much, although I think a lot of it might have been not following the linguistic/cultural stuff very well, and I think it would probably also come across better as an adult? I don't think I ever read Mirabile.
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Date: 2020-12-03 05:02 am (UTC)Ah, I read Hellspark in college upon finding a used copy, which may've helped a bit re: context. I wouldn't suggest spending a lot of time tracking Mirabile down (I think there was a recentish epub reissue of most of Kagan's work), but perhaps others here may have better memories of it.
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Date: 2020-12-03 05:37 am (UTC)There is a lot of angst too, mind you -- Saavik's backstory is that she had an extremely harsh childhood on the planet Hellguard, though the second scene is the Vulcans coming to rescue all the kids, so it's not front and center for most of the book -- though she later has to confront her trauma, so, you know, there's that. And a doomsday weapon that kills a bunch of people. You know, that kind of thing :)
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Date: 2020-12-02 06:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-02 08:36 am (UTC)Now that is definitely a Happy Ending.
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Date: 2020-12-03 04:43 am (UTC)I like Emily's clairvoyance too! Ha, that's a good point about Dean. And yes to the going away :D
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Date: 2020-12-03 04:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-03 05:39 am (UTC)YES THIS. Honestly I thought Emily should just go live somewhere else for a while (with Ilse would have been fine! But without any of those boys!) and meet some new people!
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Date: 2020-12-03 10:37 am (UTC)Yes!
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Date: 2020-12-02 07:33 am (UTC)Sigh. "Near" keeps receding into the future, as I do *zero* German while Yuletide is in session and my sleep is wrecked. But sometime next year, after I get through my German list and salon starts up again, we shall do French!
I swear I'm getting closer to being able to read in German, but after the 25th, you have to yell at me about quota again. ;)
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Date: 2020-12-03 04:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-02 08:35 am (UTC)I have a Finnish sequel to the Emily series in which she is married to Teddy, which was recently published as a proper book, not fanfic, although it is fanfic, and I wonder if anyone would pay me to translate it except I've got to finish reading it myself first and I'm not that excited by Emily's happy married life with Teddy (perhaps it all goes horribly wrong halfway through). Though translating it into English would be harder than writing it in Finnish because you would have to sound much more like Montgomery than the Finnish has to :-)
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Date: 2020-12-03 04:58 am (UTC)"I still can’t really imagine Emily and Teddy, you know, hanging out. Eating dinner together. Talking about taking out the trash. Saying, “Could you pass the salt?” I just can’t picture that. Maybe Emily would send a telepathic message to Teddy across the table: “pass me the salt” and Teddy, with a haunting whistle that echoes thru the ages, obeys.
I mean … what?"
Sounding like Montgomery is peculiarly difficult!
not that I would have unsuccessfully tried or anythingno subject
Date: 2020-12-03 08:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-02 01:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-03 04:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-02 04:02 pm (UTC)This was a book I read myself as a kid and really liked, and then read it aloud (in Russian) to L when she was younger, and there are parts I couldn't read without tearing up, though it would've been difficult to explain to a kid WHY I was crying (but fortunately she didn't notice).
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Date: 2020-12-03 05:02 am (UTC)I also had E read it at the same time I was reading it, mostly because she likes foxes and fantasy, but she didn't (of course) have the strong emotional reaction I did.
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Date: 2020-12-02 04:40 pm (UTC)I have a visceral reaction against all these things I was turned off as a kid, even knowing intellectually that it's not the fault of the things I was turned off (like Spanish), which is why I haven't gotten around to rereading The Little Prince.
I have a post in my head about how English teachers turn people off Shakespeare (which I also have a visceral reaction against), and it wasn't just my crap high school, because I've run into it in at least three other books, two fictional, one a memoir, in which the students' first introduction to Shakespeare is the same as mine: that his plays are incomprehensible, and therefore both boring and stressful.
WHY.
Totally unrelated, I was looking through old emails this morning and saw you commenting that any decent math/physics teacher should give partial credit if they see you understand the concept and just screwed up the math. I should point out that a number of my math teachers graded like this.
You come to class with your homework. You hand it to the student behind you and receive the homework of the person in front of you. The teacher reads off the number that is the answer to each question. The student who has your homework marks your question right or wrong based on whether their interpretation of your handwriting in the final number matches what they heard. (I have bad handwriting, and my 4s and 9s were easily confused.) At the end, they tally up the number they marked wrong at the end and write your grade at the top. You turn around and look at the number at the top of your paper in the hands of the student behind you. Then all papers are handed back to the teacher, for them to write down the numerical grade at the top of in their gradebook, without ever reviewing the paper itself. You may or may not get your homework back to study from before the exam. Alternatively, the teacher goes through the gradebook alphabetically and calls out your name, then you call back the number on your paper, and they write down the grade on the spot without ever laying eyes on your paper. It's very efficient for everything except learning.
Not my college professors, fortunately, but it was my first college physics prof who was fond of saying that if your final number was wrong, your bridge would fall down irl. I went almost overnight from being an enthusiastic physics major to having a visceral reaction against physics for ten years. (Other things that contributed to this: being tested on vector calculus that wasn't in the prerequisites for the course and that I wouldn't take until the following semester; lab work being a set of hoops to jump through that taught me *neither* empirical techniques nor helped me grasp theoretical concepts, and resulted in lab reports where my empirical results never matched the theory, no matter how well I understood the theory; being taught proofs and derivations and tested on problem-solving. Okay, you know, past self, I forgive you for switching majors to math. Where things were bad, but not nearly *this* bad.)
And yes, you can tell I still kind of feel bad about switching, but yeah. *gives past self a comforting pat on the shoulder*
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Date: 2020-12-03 05:13 am (UTC)1. Read the entire book within a day or two of being assigned it
2. Say nothing during class so as not to indicate that I have already read the book, although the teachers have figured this out, but what can they do, erase the knowledge from my brain? Give me a bad grade because I read ahead in the book?? Ha. I would have liked to see them try, my mom would have eaten them for breakfast.
3. Also don't pay attention during class because I've already read the book, have my own opinions, and don't really care about theirs
This was certainly not what my English teacher(s) had in mind, but it seems to have been highly effective in that I don't retain any information about what my English teachers said in class, and as a result I don't seem to hate any books we studied in English class. (Always excepting Senior English Teacher! I remember a lot of what he said, but it helped rather than hurt.)
Your math teachers were terrible, but you already knew this :P
being tested on vector calculus that wasn't in the prerequisites for the course and that I wouldn't take until the following semester;
Because of the way normal college sequences work, this is extremely common (my freshman physics was like this as well), but the class is supposed to teach it to you!
lab work being a set of hoops to jump through that taught me *neither* empirical techniques nor helped me grasp theoretical concepts, and resulted in lab reports where my empirical results never matched the theory, no matter how well I understood the theory;
Heh. I had forgotten this, but we had a physics section where the TA roundly berated us for finding a value of g that was consistent with the actual value, because it turned out that there were enough sources of error that we shouldn't have gotten something consistent with the actual value :) But I think mostly we just solved this by not having much lab work until junior year.
being taught proofs and derivations and tested on problem-solving.
Huh, this was more common in math than in physics for me (though also what would frequently happen is that the proofs would happen in class and actual problem-solving would happen in section, with the TAs who knew how this went).
Okay, you know, past self, I forgive you for switching majors to math.
This is the most surprising thing of all to me! When I was in college, math was the "cool major" and physics was not nearly as cool -- I always felt like I wasn't smart enough to major in math. (This was in large part my past self being an inordinate snob. Past self also did not think engineering was cool at all, which meant I just didn't take the engineering math class (which was strongly recommended for physics majors) and which I Very Much Regret now.)
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Date: 2020-12-03 11:40 am (UTC)I'm glad you found a system that worked for you! My problem was the exact opposite of yours: they would tell us to read things before we'd talked about them in class, and then expect us to have opinions before we'd talked about them, and we'd all go home and read something we didn't understand and come to class confused and stressed because we were expected to have opinions about something we didn't even understand.
I had this same experience from the other side when I was the TA in college too: we'd expect the students to read things and form opinions about them on the first read without any help at all, and then get frustrated with the students when it was clear that they didn't even understand what they had read (and the students were equally frustrated with us for expecting them to). If I have one regret as TA, it's not telling my students to read the Cliffs Notes first, *then* try to read the assigned text, regardless of what the professor said and whether that was technically forbidden.
Remember a few weeks ago when I was reporting on the Molière play Hille quoted at Fritz? When I went to do my detective work on it, I told myself I was going to do the thing I was never allowed to do in school, which is read a summary first, and *then* go look at the actual work of literature. And I had to convince myself that this was *morally okay*. I was then promptly amazed (but not surprised) at how much more fun the actual experience of reading the text was, and how much I actually liked it and wanted more! Like, I was not turned off by diving cold into a work of literature and trying to puzzle it out from scratch, getting confused, and knowing that I was failing at what I was supposed to be doing.
Pretty much the only time in real life where you actually have to read a work cold that is unknown to mankind is when you're a papyrologist turning up a work that no one has ever read before, and it turns out we don't expect high schoolers to do that. In real life, you can find out what a work of literature is about and what other people have said about it before you have to read it beginning to end, and you don't have to form your opinions in a vacuum. (If you can understand and analyze literature in a vacuum, great. The sheer number of students, including myself, who can't, leads me to believe that we shouldn't force students to do this and expect them not to end up hating the literature in question.)
Thinking about it, it's also possible that part of the problem was being repeatedly assigned books that were totally over our heads, which means we never developed the skills by doing something that we were capable of doing and gradually increasing our capabilities. We were thrown off the deep end (you're in 7th grade! here is an adult novel with language you don't understand in a book you aren't motivated to read! figure it out!), and so even when we were assigned books that were, or should have been, within our reading level (like The Little Prince in 11th grade), we hadn't developed the skills of analyzing literature, and so we were just as lost.
There was so much guesswork involved in figuring out what the instructor wanted: it was literally trial and error. You would read a book, not understand it, write an essay, get told what was wrong with your essay, and try to do what the instructor said on the next iteration of your essay, without understanding *why* you were doing the thing or whether you were doing it right.
There were really two problems: we weren't being *taught* to interpret literature, and we really, really weren't being *taught* how to write essays. In both cases, we were being expected to do it up front, without instruction, and then being criticized on what we did wrong.
And for once, this wasn't an artefact of my parents' decision to tell my education didn't matter and send me to the worst high school around: this is every class I ever had* on literature in my New Mexico junior high, my Arizona high school, the University of Arizona, and UCLA, and book after book I keep reading. The idea seems to be that if you tell the students what the book means, you're "spoonfeeding" them and "telling them the answer." They should figure it out by guesswork.
[* ETA: With one exception that I just remembered. I didn't learn to analyze literature or write essays from this teacher, but I acquired familiarity with specific works of literature--like To Kill A Mockingbird!--and learned to like them instead of hating them. Unfortunately, this was the "volleyball team played good" teacher who was a stranger to grammar, so... you win some, you lose some.]
Well, it turns out that the ability to read and understand a book without explanation is something I can do with increasingly difficult books with practice, but I wasn't born knowing how to do it, and you can't throw me into a random adult book starting at age 12 and expect me to figure it out. Also, the more archaic the language, the harder it is to figure out the text regardless of content, so maybe help a student out?
Imagine if we taught math that way. "Here are some problems. Take your best guess at solving them using a technique you never learned and have never seen demonstrated. I'll tell you what you did wrong." That's...actually exactly how I learned (i.e., didn't learn) vector calculus in physics, and exactly why I dropped physics.
Come to think of it, art history in my experience is taught exactly the right way: they show you 10 paintings, explain what you're seeing, and then show you a new painting and have you apply what you learned, at which point you (or at least I) feel empowered and excited instead of confused and stressed. This is how I learned to love art history! (I learned to hate art history in high school, but for a different reason: they were teaching us to memorize facts about works of art, artists, techniques, and schools, not the skill of reading works of art so that we know what we're looking at when we encounter a new work in a familiar genre. And, reprising my usual problem with literature, in high school we didn't get to pick what subset of art history or literature we wanted to study. In college, at least after freshman English, we did get to choose, and so my engagement level was much higher. Turns out not all literature and art is equally of interest to me! And if it's all equally valuable, why not let me choose?)
though up to that point we'd had readers rather than an actual novel):
Yeah, we started with adult-level novels like Death Comes for the Archbishop, Jane Eyre, and Great Expectations in 7th grade, and no one would tell us what the books were *about*; we had to read them cold and come to class prepared to discuss them. This probably has a lot to do with me being assigned something short, syntactically simple, and lexically simple like The Little Prince years later and thinking, "Yeah, I know what the words mean, but I don't know what it's *about*, i.e. I don't know what you want from me."
But I think mostly we just solved this by not having much lab work until junior year.
Oh, dear lord, every science class I had had lab work every week, and physics always had a lab report expected. Chemistry lab I saw the point of, because we were 1) learning techniques, 2) seeing things behave as we'd been taught they did. Dropping 20 little balls down tubes and measuring where they landed and attempting to prove that our results in the aggregate were consistent with a formula that works for frictionless vacuums was--I mean, somehow, some physicist, probably in the 17th century, did this and derived the formula, but I feel like they were some kind of genius and not every single freshman who ever took a physics class, and also they possibly had more time to try to control for different variables. We were given one lab session in which to perform the experiment to the best of our ability and record our data points, and then one weekend at home to try to make the numbers match theory. I do not feel like we were ever taught how to make the numbers approximate theory; it was just assumed that all confounding factors would disappear or cancel out or something, and that when we had a scattering of random-seeming numbers, somehow we would intuit how they proved the formula we learned in class was correct. Amount learned: literally 0. Stress level: high.
Because of the way normal college sequences work, this is extremely common (my freshman physics was like this as well), but the class is supposed to teach it to you!
Professor said we should already know this, TA demoed the solving of one problem on the board when I walked up to his desk at the end of lab and asked him about this thing I'd never heard of, boom! I had been taught dot products and cross products, and was henceforth responsible for recognizing when to use them to solve a problem and knowing how to apply the technique.
This is the most surprising thing of all to me! When I was in college, math was the "cool major" and physics was not nearly as cool -- I always felt like I wasn't smart enough to major in math.
See, for me it was less about prestige and more about trying and failing. I was good at physics in high school (because we were tested on what we were taught, because we used math we already knew, because lab was equally pointless but not rigorously graded) and had visions of a whole career in physics, then suddenly I was really bad at it in college and in danger of losing my tuition waiver: major self-esteem hit.
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