Why do I feel like half my posts on here are about procrastinating from essays? (Victoria)
So I’ve 800/2000 drafted words for an essay due Friday and nothing on the 3200 words due next week yet I’m sitting in the library watching Supernatural and writing this. But okay, I’ll spin this one into something more productive
So, one of the requirements for Arts is to take an Arts Foundation subject. Foundations are supposed to help us learn the basics of studying arts namely research, referencing and writing. We have workshops intending to teahc us these skills and I expected to get out of semester one reasonably confident that I could manage these. Except I didn’t.
Then a couple of weeks ago in Lit we had a couple of lectures on the matter (by Katherine, an Academic Skills peep and one of our blog supervisors) and it was like two hours explaining everything a semester and a half of Foundations (I’m taking one this semester. No workshops though) has failed to do. All I could think was, why is this something stuffed in the middle of a discipline subject instead of the subjects made for it?
And I mean it’s all well and good for the English students who’ve had these lectures, but what about the rest of the Arts students who are fumbling through researching inefficiently, however well intentioned. I mean, a lot of the ideas I’d already half worked out just because they made sense, but it was just so nice to know there are easy ways to study effectively.
But then, instead of studying I’m having Winchester feels.
Definitely agree with the whole Arts Foundation thing – I was going to write a post about this myself!! 😀
I did Power last semester and I think it was one of the most intense subjects out of the 8 I’ve taken. It didn’t really feel like it gave me a ‘foundation’, but instead freaked me out with its highly intellectual lectures. The readings would jump- without warning or context – from subjects like Foucault’s theories of power to Marx&Engels’s communism to war time rape! Maybe they were trying to throw us First Years into the deep end and give us a taster of some influential ‘power’-related issues and ideologies, but some more structural/simplified stuff would have been brilliant.
Katherine should totally give a lecture at the beginning of all of the Arts Foundation subjects! Totally agree, it was finally everything we needed to hear!