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It often seems to me as if almost everyone in my linguistics classes are idiots – they don't seem to pick up on ideas easily, they ask stupid questions that they should've known had they been listening, and so on and so forth. It's really kind of grating to have to sit there and listen. This leads me to one of two conclusions: either they really are dumb, or I'm just good at linguistics. I prefer to think it's the latter, since, at the same time, it makes me look good and the rest of the class not look bad. In the meantime, I'm stuck wondering whether I have nothing to worry about, as long as I keep on top of my readings, or if I'm really being overconfident when the professor says that doing summaries of a few articles is hard, and I don't believe him at all.
I think part of the problem is that linguistics, while in the arts faculty, isn't really an arts-y area. It's kind of in the grey part between art and science. It involves talking to people, a lot of writing, and studying language. That's all pretty artsy, right? But then you get into the constant analyzation, the things that require heavy critical thinking skills – skills I learned in science classes! - that a lot of people don't think they need when they talk about languages. Hence, you get a lot of people in the classes that like languages and want to study them, but who don't understand that what they're doing in linguistics is mostly scientific – they haven't been taught the skills they need to come to conclusions based on a pile of data given to them. They can't use logic to put two and two together and come out with four. No amount of picking apart metaphors or finding the underlying meaning of something will save them in this field.
Meanwhile, I'll enjoy the interesting logic puzzles that come out of morphology, and go about being bored in class, I guess.
I think part of the problem is that linguistics, while in the arts faculty, isn't really an arts-y area. It's kind of in the grey part between art and science. It involves talking to people, a lot of writing, and studying language. That's all pretty artsy, right? But then you get into the constant analyzation, the things that require heavy critical thinking skills – skills I learned in science classes! - that a lot of people don't think they need when they talk about languages. Hence, you get a lot of people in the classes that like languages and want to study them, but who don't understand that what they're doing in linguistics is mostly scientific – they haven't been taught the skills they need to come to conclusions based on a pile of data given to them. They can't use logic to put two and two together and come out with four. No amount of picking apart metaphors or finding the underlying meaning of something will save them in this field.
Meanwhile, I'll enjoy the interesting logic puzzles that come out of morphology, and go about being bored in class, I guess.
