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Logging in Class

Authors: Ben <benk@tilde.team>

Dated: 2020-10-14

So I have a morning class on Wednesdays at 8:00 AM. This semester it's the only morning class that I have, which is nice. On the other hand, since classes are online now, morning classes are a lot more tolerable since I can roll out of bed and sit in front of the computer with a cup of coffee. No commute, no problem.

This particular course (which I'm sitting in now) is about literary style with focus on prose. When you study Persian literature, the priority is on poetry, because classical poetry is considered the heart of literature. That doesn't mean there isn't modern or prose literature in Persian; actually there is a lot, but as a matter of cultural values the study of classical literature is very prestigious in Persian speaking societies, much more than in European societies. Therefore, this course is the second of two, where the first focused on poetry.

In general it's hard for me to pay attention to class unless the lecture is very interesting or at least well organized and delivered. I have teachers who are very good at delivering a structured lecture, and I also have teachers that sort of ramble and fess around. I wish I could say most of my teachers are great, but many would spend class time just reading to us from a text. I could read the book on my own time; no need for a meeting.

The teacher of this particular class is a wonderful and nice person, but she falls into the latter group that would spend a class session just reading the syllabus to us and then going over the course notes page by page. Today she is talking about rhetorical devices like irony and attempting to explain them to the students. It's all fine for me since these are things I learned back in high school literature classes, except this time it's in another language. I guess most of the work that I will end up having to do for this class is just study its terminology and how to translate it.

When I was in high school I never imagined I would study literature. I was good at the humanities, but was raised in a culture or environment where these things were not taken seriously. At worst, they were considered a waste of time as a study or profession, at best useful only as a hobby. I imagined I would go to university and study something technical like computer science, or math or engineering.

As much as I'm involved in computing, it's interesting how at the university level these technical subjects that appealed to me in high school somehow grew old or tedious. Programming used to be my main persuit, but I had pretty much stopped coding by the time I was eighteen. At that age I was discovering a wide world of human thought and experience.

I was also very particularly attracted to language, so here I am now. Of course, I'm perfectly glad I went down the path that I have, though it has been long and complicated. My original motivation for wanting to study computer science in college was just the idea that I'd get a job. Looking back on it, I'm glad I didn't become a slave to some corporation in my early or mid twenties. Not that that's the only path, but was the basic idea.

One day in the future I may end up working as a professional programmer or sysadmin, albeit one with a litearture degree. It's known to happen. :)