3.02.2004

 

Feeling stupid

I hate feeling stupid/confused/lost in a class, especially when it's in my major and something I really ought to be able to understand. Schenker theory is quite confusing the way it's being presented to me, and I'm having trouble reconciling our textbook, supposedly based on his theories, with his actual writings and musical graphs. It just don't add up, man. This weekend was a welcomed opportunity to hear actual theorists using Schenkerian analysis, so I think I'm more on board with the whole thing than I was before the conference. HOWEVER, I still feel a bit tossed around in this class, as if perhaps I and my few compatriots on the back row are a step behind where we should be with no hope of catching up. We're smart people. I don't understand.

In other news, things are bright and sunny and it's 80 degrees here. Packed-lunch club held its first outdoor meeting with four attendees, and it was lovely. We sat in the amphitheater next to the music building, and two different interesting groups of people happened by while we were there. The first group, who went to the small woody area near the theater, was some sort of class or club who were engaged in teambuilding exercises like Amoeba Tag and Wind in the Willows. I wondered if perhaps they were RAs, given the fact that I know the names of these exercises from church camp and, more recently, three years of RA training. The second group was certainly a class, though figuring out what type of class they were was the main game we clubbers played after eating. There were probably 40 of them, and they sat in the first few rows at the theater listening to their professor for a while. (This right here could have been any sort of humanities class that doesn't revolve around props the way music and most science classes do. I hearkened back to the old days of English classes at Queens and thought how easy it had been to convince those professors to move class outside on days like today.) Anyway, after the professor had been up front talking for a bit, he had four students come stand up at the front. They all appeared to be reading from handouts, and I kept waiting for them to give some sort of dramatic reading of Shakespeare or to re-enact the battle of Vicksburg so that we could see what the heck kind of class they were, but alas, they did nothing we could discern. The professor was still talking, even through one of his students' cell phones sounding off rather conspicuously, and after a while we needed to return to our lives, so we gave up, never knowing the secret to the mysterious class. This is my life now, devoted to people-watching and speculation. I need a shower.

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