Literary

I've picked up two HASS classes: (17.551) The Political Economy of Chinese Reform; and (21L.017) The Art of the Probable. The first is excellent, while the other is about as fun as stabbing myself in the eye. (But it's a HASS-D.)

The professor in 17.551, Ed Steinfeld (who is incidentally one letter away from two former TV shows), is an engaging lecturer who has "lived" the material, having experienced China's political economy through teaching in the country for years, including through the 1989 protest. He pronounces Chinese terms in Chinese, and it is frankly the best Chinese I have heard from, well, a white guy. He sounds like a native. It's such an enjoyable classes that I don't mind reading for it (even though the reading took seven hours the first week, when I added the class), because the professor crafts the information into a comprehensible narrative. History becomes a story, and stories are entertaining, which makes him a success. Of course he tells us he doesn't have all the answers, especially on contemporary issues, and we are often conjecturing on why things happened the way they did. Eventually we will ponder what is to come.


21L.017 is not successful, probably because of a lack of narrative. The professors' lectures and my recitations are quite ADD -- we skip from topic to topic, work to work, chapter to chapter, never spending sufficient time on any piece to explore it in any depth. After two weeks, I've become discouraged from doing the readings at all, because it doesn't seem like a good investment of time. All I need to do is show up at lecture (comatose in some cases), throw out some philosophical bullshit in recitation, and do just enough reading to be able to churn out an essay. Tracing specific lines throughout Hamlet that demonstrate Shakespeare's skillful usage of body imagery does me no good. The material also makes me feel like I'm in a bad math or physics class sometimes. For example, at the lecture on Monday, the following discourses occurred:

Prof K: What's momentum?
Max M: Mass times velocity.
Prof K: Velocity? Isn't there a more.. scientific term for that?
...
Prof R: Momentum and acceleration are not the same thing.
Prof K: (in perfect seriousness) Can we pretend they are?


In other news, I dropped 6.003, spurred by advice from my 6.002 TA from last semester. Attempts to listen in on the class have so far failed, the latest attempt being thwarted by yesterday's three-and-a-half-hour-long MMP meeting.