Jay wrote:
Uzique wrote:
i like how you posted an essay here a few months ago with shitty formal english and an extremely weak argument that was passable as a D-grade piece of work at best, and you proclaim that english "is not difficult at all". if you're evidently shit at it, how is it easy? and do not put sociology or political science on the same level of difficulty as the 'pure' arts/humanities subjects, haha. english literature, classics and philosophy are much harder than sociology and polit sci and all of these new disciplines. also, it is englit and not just 'english' - a lot of shittier colleges will offer an 'english' degree that has nothing to do with the classical version of the subject, and is more like a course in public speaking and basic language study.
i find it laughable that someone with clearly no ability in a subject can say it is "easy". i can't do engineering but do i say it is simple because it is all taught from a textbook? do i think physics is easy because the physics students i know hardly know anything about geopolitics, or even basic geography? we're all specialising in vastly different disciplines requiring entirely different skillsets. if you somehow think you're 'better' than people taking other (serious) academic degrees, then that only betrays either your own intellectual insecurity, or your own mad fucking delusion. fair enough if you have a political science department at your university that is pretty laid-back and lenient - basically a cash-spinner for the dim minded. but don't be condescending about people doing hard, rigorous work in proper academic disciplines. just makes you look more like an idiot. whether or not it pays according to the 'functions of supply and demand' is completely divorced from the intellectual merit of a subject. i'm betting you wouldn't last 2 minutes in a post-structuralism seminar.
I got an A on that paper Uzique. That shitty, shitty paper was an A grade. THAT is why people look down on english majors. The grading is entirely subjective.
not subjective, no. relative. relative, jay. you go to a completely non-academic college that just had the english assignment as some minor 'tick the box' hoop to jump through to satisfy the criteria of your ENGINEERING DEGREE. are you seriously naive enough to think that the same essay, handed in to a serious academic department, at a university of real weight, would earn a top-grade? haha, ok. all english is easy because jay did a high-school level book-report and got an A. you didn't even quote derrida or foucault, jay! that's the first-step for a "lazy, path of least resistance" english student at a mediocre college. without any exaggeration that essay would have not even earned a pass-grade over here. we come from vastly different worlds. you're doing your thing, which is fine, but that doesn't mean arts and humanities are 'easy'. your experience of them is basically a non-experience. to claim furthermore that, because grading of arts and humanities is 'subjective', and not verifiable by a textbook answer-sheet, makes it a 'lesser' subject, is fucking hilarious. i'm not even going to counter that. if you're writing philosophy or theory essays for an oxbridge-educated professor, and they're grading your work with due academic rigour, it is a worthy intellectual pursuit. i don't care what you say. just because they can't put a tick or a cross next to your response, doesn't mean it's the work of a lesser intelligence. you are so full of delusional bullshit sometimes that it physically hurts me to read-- though i'm not sure whether it's hilarity or sadness.
essentially your only 'college-level' (i put that in hugely spurious quotemarks) english is some token minor module to 'round out' your education. that's like me taking a basic high-school calc level module for part of my degree and then saying degree-level math is natch, no problemo. thankfully over here we don't have a degree structure that forces you to superficially dabble in other disciplines: you study what you study, and you study it damn hard and damn thoroughly. the problem with the american degree, it seems to me, is that you're forced to engage only at a surface level with other fields -- e.g. macbeth taking philosophy as part of a polit sci class -- and then think you have seen all there is to see, and command a good knowledge of the field. "english is a lowly easy subject because i got an A in a book-review assignment whilst doing an engineering course" isn't quite credible. the level of work simply is not comparable, jay. the flaw, it seems to me, is with your college culture and with your degree structure itself. being forced to take one-semester long tokenistic courses in vastly disparate disciplines is going to edge you towards being more of the "jack of all trades, master of none" student that you spoke-out against earlier with disdain. over here, we bury ourselves in one discipline for 3/4 years, as a serious academic pursuit. fyi i have not been asked to write an assignment with a question like the one you posted since i was about 15, in high-school.