School comes hand-in-hand with reading and writing, that’s a given. I’m taking a literature class in espionage and spy fiction so, of course, there’s going to be a considerable amount of reading there. I’m also taking a class where each week we screen a film and then we're expected to write a reaction paper, or analysis of that film for the next week’s class. The class is called Dark Dreams: Studying the Horror Film. It’s really fascinating and the professor is super-smart and has great taste in films, so I’m happy to do the work that’s expected for that class.
When registering, I had pretty much decided that I was going to be taking those two classes, and I knew that they were both likely to have a pretty heavy workload. I needed to choose a third class for the semester, and so I figured I should probably choose one that wasn't as likely to have so much work. I perused the catalog, and judging from the various class descriptions, I chose 'The Culture of Food' thinking that we would be talking about how different cultures eat, how certain “ethnic” foods became popular in American culture, etc. Well, we do talk about that stuff, but we are also expected to read an abundance of classic essays from different anthologies of anthropologist’s writings; Margaret Mead, Claude Lévi-Strauss, etc… And then we are expected to write a reaction paper to everything that we’ve read.
Now, I’m not saying that this stuff isn’t interesting - far from it. But it takes a couple of readings for me to fully understand these anthropologist's theories, and then I have to wrestle with writing about them.
This turns out not to be a cute-little-food-class-to-fill-in-your-schedule as I was expecting/hoping it would be. It is rather a full-on, hardcore anthropology course!
I know – It’s called school for a reason. What did I expect?
