random drive-by college post

[edenfalling]

In my various attempts at academic learning, the only thing that straight-up defeated me was visualizing stereoisomers in organic chemistry. A few other things could take a lot of time and concentration, but that was the only one I flat out could not do. And there isn't a good mathematical workaround, which is annoying. I wasn't great at visualizing inorganic quantum chemistry operations, either, but you can do that stuff with numbers and matrices, and math makes sense.

But enough tangents.

The point is that I am now damned glad I never decided to major in economics, because apparently I can't read more than about twenty-five pages of economic theory at a go without putting myself to sleep. Literally. I mean, this afternoon I was nearing the end of an excerpt from Malthus's work on political economy, and he mentioned the word "clogs" -- as in, things that obstruct a smooth rate of flow -- and I drifted off into a vivid hallucination of reading a paragraph wherein he began ranting about shoemakers. It was illustrated, too, with a very nice green ink line drawing of him hurling a wooden shoe beyond the drawn frame of his portrait.

...

I took a five minute nap after finishing that excerpt and before starting on the next one.

Comments

[heliopausa]

That's a brilliant hallucination you've got there! And if somebody-or-other could dream the structure of the benzene atom (molecule?) (you know - the story about the snake swallowing its tail) then maybe your hallucination would bear re-examination. :)

[edenfalling]

It was a very convincing hallucination! I blinked back to normal awareness, looked down at the page, and was quite taken aback that the paragraph in question didn't say anything about shoes, nor were there any illustrations, green or otherwise.

Obviously this means my next essay will focus on shoes and/or shoemakers. :-)

[wistfulmemory.livejournal.com]

I was a history/English double major in college, so I had lots to read each semester. The only time I ever fell asleep reading for class was with the textbook for my Renaissance and Reformation class (which is a time period I like). The textbook was so boring, and the teacher even admitted he'd wanted a different book, but it was out of print, so we were stuck with the other one.

Those were some good Friday afternoon naps...

[edenfalling]

Textbooks are annoyingly variable, and sometimes you have to suffer through a tin-eared writer who's the only one who covered the relevant subject in the right level of detail. *sigh*

I have four textbooks for this particular course: two histories written by a single author, one collection of essays (adapted from talks given at a particular conference) about merchant empires, and one reader of excerpted texts on the history of economic thought. The first two are fine! Very readable, except for the time one tried to jam too many tables into a sub-chapter and the pagination got kind of weird. The essays were variable depending on author and topic, but they only got impenetrable in that standard "you have spent too long in academia and been infected by jargon" way. The Very Important Economic Text excerpts? Every single one of them sends me off to sleep.

But it's still not the most boring textbook I've ever tried to read. That record goes to a book about the electrification of rural America, which was part of a technology and culture sociology course. You would think this was an interesting topic -- how do we solve various technological problems of scale? how do we make the enterprise profitable for the power companies? how do we interest farm families in electrical products? how do we finagle political support for various projects? etc. -- but in practice it felt like an endless slog through the wastelands of varying electric stove specifications. Unfortunately, it was written by the professor, so I couldn't skip it. *headdesk*

I got through it in ten-page increments, aided by a lot of caffeine, junk food bribes to myself, strategic five-minute naps, and repeated walks all around my dorm building.