« Jackie Chan can get that torch… | Home | Recommending college classes »
How about some college advice for a change, Lawrence?
By Lawrence | April 9, 2008
“All you do these days is write weird imaginary scenarios about something nobody cares about. Plus, it’s probably personally insulting to at least some of your clients.”
Oh. okay. Well, I wrote alot of stuff about how to write a term paper, but nobody commented, so my ego lost interest and sought other ways to satisfy my innate, magnetic, powerful vanity.
But I can tell you some stuff about college, particularly yinz guys who are into the humanities. Or ‘arts and sciences,’ is that what we are calling them now? What is that, like paintings and test tubes?
Well, today, I am going to tell you all about what courses to take and not to take in college.
Logic- awesome, but you’re gonna have to work. Logic is alot like high school geometry, in that you have assumptions or axioms that you live by, and use them to tackle a problem and construct a solution. It is not like algebra, where the equation is simply missing something and you are called upon to guess what it is, and only one answer out of about 400 billion possible answers is actually right. In logic, you get to build a proof out of interesting symbols, which may indicate negation, if A then B, or either or.
Logic is a foundation upon which many beliefs are built, and its strictly, well logical structure can make an opinion absolutely unassailable. For instance, lots of women believe that “all men are scum.” Then, maybe a woman who believes that meets Stan. If she can bring herself to believe that he is a man…well, you know. So logic can really help you in holding popular opinions.
Logic is really rigorous, as befits a discipline committed to “dead certainty” (my old Logic teacher’s favorite phrase, actually it was ‘dead cert’). It can be a challenging course that you will have to attend (or at least closely follow the textbook), but the reward is that you can get a huge whiteboard and magic markers, then go around and ‘prove’ to your friends that they are really dumbasses, or drunk, or even ostriches.
Sociology- Ooh, I am gonna have to give this one a no-go. I took one class in this, vaguely I remember it was about health, welfare and politics in communist China. The instructor was great, but the course was a challenge, and I just have to ask, ‘to what end?’ I was a freshman trying to prove myself in upper level disciplines, but I had no motivation to pursue this line of thinking any further. I remember studying VERY hard for the midterm exam, which was essay. I spent many, many hours studying charts and graphs, and then committing to memory the implications that those numbers held. And then constructing a coherent argument from those. It is possible, but why?
More to come minyana…
Topics: Term Papers and Essays |