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The knowing look and we nod silently.

A couple days ago I stopped my car just in time to let a crippled bird hoppity-hop his way across the road. He jumped up onto the curb and looked back at me as if to thank me for my consideration before I continued on my way. Then, as I drove home, a typical Westlake mom almost sideswiped me when she dramatically tried to jerk her car into my lane. I guess I can't get too upset at that since I was basically in her blind spot. Oh wait, it was actually the opposite. I was actually mostly in front of her--she was basically in my blind spot. She sped up in her lane and sort of made a halfhearted apologetic gesture with her bejeweled hand and I sped the rest of the way home, leaving her far behind.

Not to be blasphemous, but this is probably how Jesus felt when he did good things and everybody around him was an ass.

I really was excited to take these history classes over the summer. "History of Mexican Americans in the U.S." and "Main Current American Culture Since 1865." These are basically the first humanities classes I've taken at UT. It's weird to think about it, but I've actually only taken science and math so far. Actually, pretty much exclusively science up until this point. And the thing about science is that you never really get that human perspective. Science is sort of an ongoing quest for knowledge that is blanketed with anonymity. If you think about it, it's really just a presentation of facts, methods of finding those facts, and the possibility to discover more facts using new methods. There's never an individual context for it.

But there is in a humanities course, which is why I was looking forward to it. It's nice to step back and look at people as people and not organisms.

Unfortunately these professors had different plans for their classes than what I'd hoped for. Not to betray personal political beliefs or biases, but all these professors do is indoctrinate their students with liberal dogma. There is, essentially, no transmission of historical facts or information of knowledge beyond a general sentiment that if you hold political views that differ from the professors then you are some sort of uneducated, backwards piece of shit person who doesn't deserve to be alive. It's disgusting, really. If they slipped in their personal political opinions every once in a while then that's fine, so long as they acknowledge that it is their own. But when sizable portions of class time are taken out for them to rant about how dumb religion is or how stupid conservatives are it gets to be overbearingly ridiculous. At this point, I have no respect for these professors. Admittedly, though, I did not hold them in high regard before classes started.

It's not a problem that you see in science classes, which is probably why I quite naively skipped into class the first day. Science seems to transcend all of that bullshit. Even where political views could be incorporated into lectures or opinions over controversial topics could be suggested, I've never actually observed such transgressions in a science class. The professors respect their class too much, I guess. Or, I think, they simply realize that the scope of science will never be bounded by the humanities. They realize that the pursuit of knowledge draws them to the universal scale--far beyond the supposed cultural epicenters that these professors seem to think constitute the entire world.

It's a wonder to me that these people are actually employed as and call themselves teachers, what with their heads being so far up their asses.

Comments

Carolynn said…
Didn't you take History of Rock and Roll, bro?

Also, my Italian professor talked about Obama so much during the election that some kids in my class bought him an Obama bobble head doll. I think these professors think they are broadening our horizons when they just extol their personal opinions.

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