Mrph. Glrrg. Blrgh.
In other words, pre-coffee. I suspect this post will get more coherent the more caffeine I imbibe.
Back to my swashbuckling. I think I’m going to switch things around a bit–work in the mornings, and answering email etc. in the afternoon. I need to get Hedgewitch Queen revised and Tristan’s story started. I have five chapters of Tris’s story, but they need severe pruning since they were just “noodling”–me fumbling along, thinking about the character and trying to get to know him.
Today, however, is a busy day. There’s a class to be dropped and one to be added. It’s kind of funny–the UnSullen One was excited about taking a Women’s Studies class. He came home from the first one shaking his head and handed me the syllabus. “The woman’s like an evangelical Christian,” he says, “only it’s women.”
“Fanatic of a different stripe, eh?” I scan the syllabus, and something catches my eye. On the “style sheet” for how the instructor wants papers done, I count no less than six errors, including one that curdles my nurnie. On possessives ending in s, she wants just an apostrophe. For example: the car belonging to Elvis? Elvis’ car.
This is so wrong I don’t even know WHERE to begin. Even a cursory reading of Strunk & White lets you know it’s Elvis’s car. Standard usage nowadays is the apostrophe and the extra s.
The UnSullen One doesn’t wince when I explode. “Yeah, I saw that too. She says since she’s helped publish a book, she knows all about this.” He pauses. “I just kept my mouth shut.”
“Bitch please!” I rant. “Helped publish? What the hell does that mean? This sort of sh!te is the reason people don’t take women’s studies seriously! Bad enough that she wants to be a frocking Monty Python I’m being repressed! skit, but to pull improper possessives–”
“Can I drop it?” he asks. “Please?”
Needless to say, I gave my blessing. Now, I encouraged him to take the women’s studies class in the first place. The local community college, however, seems to have a high share of “professors” who have an axe to grind, not to mention improper grammar and punctuation. The English class he took to get into Running Start? That teacher was gunning for a women’s studies class and tried to inflict that on her students instead of sentence structure.
I do think women’s studies classes are important, but when one has fanatics teaching them, well, the whole point of the exercise is lost. Reverse inequality in the classroom does not foster a true sense of egalitarianism outside. Unfortunately, with women’s studies seen as bastard children of academia for those who have the leisure to pursue them instead of integral parts of a curriculum designed to foster inclusiveness in the cradle of critical thinking…
That’s the problem with institutional inequality. It breeds fanatical behavior on both sides–those who benefit want the status quo kept and kept hard, consciously or unconsciously, and those who are marginalized find it easy to retreat into fanaticism just to keep their fire burning against the crushing weight of said inequality.
I suppose I should find it funny that I might have counseled him to stick with the class if it hadn’t been for the punctuation errors on the style sheet, if only for the valuable experience of learning how to deal with a teacher who isn’t interested in the students learning so much as interested in forcing his or her own pet issue down the throat of impressionable youngsters. And I really do think a women’s studies course would be a good thing for the UnSullen One.
I suppose we’ll have to go back to discussing economic inequality at home, and reading things like A Doll’s House, Sleeping With The Enemy, and Queen of the South, no to mention The Yellow Wallpaper and Jacob Have I Loved and The Great Cosmic Mother.
I think I’ll save the Mary Daly for later. Heh.
Good morning, and good luck, my dears.
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