Yes, this is a Thing — this week I am gonna post every day, because I have a lot of stuff that I never quite finished last semester. And most of it fits together! Probably I should save it up and mete it out over the semester, so I don’t have eons of dead air and lose you all to Marlys Magazine (on which Lynda Barry is posting her own comics now instead of just Salon, since I don’t know when? With some frequency!) but I hate having a backlog of unfinished ideas — tends to put a damper on new developments. So enjoy Metacognition Week — the theme week which is probably misnamed, since I don’t know much about cognitive science yet!
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The Hamster Technique
Last semester I developed a new technique for writing response papers. I call it the Hamster Technique.
The first paper I wrote using the Hamster Technique was for a professor who I loved dearly, but happened to give the class a prompt that was so full of faulty assumptions that I had to completely disassemble it in order to begin to talk about the reading in question. That’s the Hamster Technique: chew the topic into tiny pieces and make a nest out of it. I felt scandalously irreverant doing it. The professor wasn’t insulted, though; he ate it up. So I kept doing it.
I rather like this technique. I don’t quite understand why I never did it at Hampshire. My guess is because I got to define most of my paper topics myself, and so often professors had few guiding comments before the writing or after that I never had to pick anything apart. I swear to god, faculty input at Hampshire was often about as pressureful as hippie toilet training.
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A Person Outside of Homework
Last semester I started to realize how useful the past four years were in thinking of myself as a Person Outside of Homework. I didn’t come up with that conception of myself until I started practicing not doing my homework intentionally, just to see what it felt like.
It was really good to not have homework. Until I stopped having homework I was unable to distinguish between the impact of factors like “organization” and “tiredness” and “intellectual boredom” and “distractions” on my performance. There was me not doing all my homework and thus being a bad person, and then there was me doing my homework and being a good person.
This was highly detrimental to my sense of well-being. Frequently there was some amount of reading I left undone; as it built up, I felt like a worse and worse person. By the end of Hampshire I was convinced I’d never amount to anything academically. I was still caught up in the nagging idea I used to have that everything a teacher assigned must be indispensable to my understanding of her field, because obviously she was an expert in it, right?
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Your Own Personal Syllabus
Apologies, this part of the post is being temporarily suppressed for political reasons. Please look for it later!
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