First Day of School!

[hannah]

My first MA exam (four hours to write three essays on 15-20 books and 30-40 films) is tomorrow, the second (same deal, different subject area) on Friday. Wish me luck, jerkwads.

[Good Intentions]

Knock them flat, you great big bell-end.

[clare]

Good luck, hannah girl! 4 hours, 3 essays sounds about right. Slay 'em.

[andronicus]

Hannah ain't need luck.  Luck is for chumps. 

May you crush your exams, see their essays driven before you and hear the lamentations of your professors.

[Thermofusion]

quick hannah what movie is that from. answer in essay form

[hannah]

Soooo Day 1 of exam went pretty OK, thanks, dumbbutts. Only hitch: so, like, I consider it really awesome if I'm able to write two double-spaced pages per hour, so I was pretty happy with my results of 7 pages double-spaced total. But then I talked to some of my, ahem, colleagues -- many had managed between 11 and 15 double-spaced pages, and one managed to get to 20. What the fuck?! Who can do that?! (Andrew, don't answer this.)

[C of heartbreak]

One side or front and back? Are we talking little exam booklet pages?

[hannah]

typed!!!!!

[G.C.R]

I get that problem lots too. You should comfort yourself with the thought that while all your words are carefully chosen and build a solid argument, the bulk of their essays are just padding and/or waffling.

[clare]

Glad it went OK. Wow, typed exams (I'm old)! How do they monitor that? (gah, that wasn't supposed to be a pun) and was it "open book"?

[jess]

We have non-open-book exams on our laptops. Honor system. For one of my classes, we were all the same room typing away, but for another, we mostly spread out, so I guess people could have cheated, but I suspect no one did.

My friend in law school though has to use this program which shuts down everything else and keeps it secure. Makes sense somehow that law school would trust people a lot less than a clinical psych program, heh.

One of my undergrad institutions though worked entirely on an honor system, and that applied to any exam, whether or your computer or not. If you wanted to take it sitting under a tree or in the library or in your door room, you could. Pretty sure in that case, there was a decent amount of cheating (students were not infrequently caught, so I assume that far more were doing it), but given the total lack of grade inflation there, I'm assuming it didn't affect things too much overall.

[clare]

Right, whereas when I was at uni there were three distinct types of exams: Closed book in which you brought yourself and your writing implements and maybe a calculator if it was relevant, nothing else (no phones even - though they were a rare commodity then), common in the humanities or sciences; Open book, in which you could bring any resource you thought might be useful (texts, lecture notes, reference books) common in the humanities and law; and Take-home where you had, say 24 hours to complete the exam and drop it in the box outside your lecturer's office.

Law exams were always open book, in the sense that you could take the copious lecture notes which contained references to various cases that you'd studied, on the grounds that if you knew what the case was that you wanted to cite, you didn't need to remember all the pesky details about it, same as if you were practicing law - you'd have access to lots of reference books.

As far as cheating goes, I'm not sure how much there was really, I reckon it'd be easy to get caught as the sit-down exams always had a troop of invigilators wandering around the room...ah uni days...I don't really miss it though.

[auto-da-fey]

First day of the semester tomorrow. I have three syllabi to write and about 40 unreturned messages in my inbox that I've let build up over the break.

I also have a stack of DVDs due tomorrow at the library, and I'm halfway through a long Donald Westlake novel that I'm pretty into. There's a conflict here, and I'm pretty sure I know how it's going to play out.

[Bernard]

I get that problem lots too. You should comfort yourself with the thought that while all your words are carefully chosen and build a solid argument, the bulk of their essays are just padding and/or waffling.

Agreed. For a blog, sure, space is cheap, go ahead and use an expansive, digressive style. For an exam, you should be making an effort to keep it lean and precise.

[hannah]

Thanks for the support, y'all. We're supposed to find out the results by the end of this week, but over the weekend the department exploded: apparently some university "task force," manned by many scientists and only a couple token humanities professors, decided the department should be closed. Uh, it's really fucked up and total nonsense and needless to say I am not feeling so hot about much right now. OK, off to Russian class! Toodle-oo!

[elpollodiablo]

Whoa, fuck! That's insane. Just budget bullshit?

[edison]

Whoa. That is completely crazy - was it something that had been hinted at before?

[C of heartbreak]

Wow Hannah, department exploding with you inside. That is rough, sorry to hear

I'm thinking of going back and earning a B.S. in physics, since I really only need like four more classes for it. On the subject of exams, once I got up to 400-level physics classes, all my exams were take-home and open-book, and we were under the honor system not to copy the answers from each other or look them up on the internet, and to spend only 24 hours completing it. Needless to say, even if we did cheat it wouldn't have done us much good.

[diesel_powered]

Thanks for the support, y'all. We're supposed to find out the results by the end of this week, but over the weekend the department exploded: apparently some university "task force," manned by many scientists and only a couple token humanities professors, decided the department should be closed. Uh, it's really fucked up and total nonsense and needless to say I am not feeling so hot about much right now. OK, off to Russian class! Toodle-oo!

That's fucked up (and just the kind of thing that goes on in universities, as per my last job's evaporation).

Also, whenever I had to write essay tests, I always came out shorter than my peers. Usually, that was because the difference between my essay and their essay was that they got nervous and padded it out with bullshit. I have every confidence you're going to do fine.

[auto-da-fey]

whoa, that's crazy. I'm assuming it's just an advisory task force though, where their lunatic recommendation will ultimately be bargained down to some sort of semi-permanent injunction against replacing retired tenure-track lines and maybe some slashing away at grad-student benefits to show 'em who's boss? it's bullshit regardless, but I can't fathom them dismantling your program, that would be pretty drastic.

[ellaguru]

... was it because of something you did? Maybe if you just apologized they wouldn't have to close down the whole department...

 

[G.C.R]

Man, that happened in our film dept a year or so ago. BIG push to asimilate Film, as well as Media Studies, into the Art History department, cut almost all classes, and call it "Visual Arts". Some people got fired, people who replaced them are on thin ice unless they prove very very popular almost immediately ( a mixed thing, a truly terrible lecturer I had last year sounds like he wont be back, but also my very favourite, who I was really hoping would be the one who would mentor me through any future post-grad research projects, is rumoured to be taking (being forced into?) early retirement). The department has lasted, but with cutbacks and much bigger attempts to make the kids who take FILM 101 because they think its just, like, watching movies, stick around and take more film papers. Bye bye papers on Bresson, hello papers on Tarantino.
It sucked but the film dept did not fare nearly as bad as the Gender and Women's studies department, which basically hardly exists now.
blah blah blah. Hannah, I hope your department pulls through. And good luck for your results.

[Bernard]

I wish I could say that things were better at my school. We're practically a trade school so I think we're safe from being openly shut down, but there's not even a single other film nerd in the undergrad program (and truthfully, only a few grad students). This is not to take anything away from the skills and talent of my classmates -- they're pretty great -- but yeah. Tarantino over Bresson, for sure. And with such a tiny number of 'proper' film students (30 per year, as opposed to 100 for the theater program, and god knows how many for something like English or psych) the lower-level classes basically have to appeal to non-majors to make up the ranks, so it's probably even sub-Tarantino.

[girl]

hannah 

[auto-da-fey]

I have definitely learned that "film buff" as used in the population we're discussing overwhelming does mean "knows not only Tarantino but Robert Rodriguez too." which, I mean, is what it is; I guess if there were a bunch of wankers dropping frequent references to Godard's Maoist period, there's a good chance it would just have the effect (and probably intention) of silencing the rest of the class into intimidation.

anyway, guess I underestimated the severity of the proposed dismantling, huh? weirdly, I just today came across Rick Altman's fall 2009 Cinema Journal article "Whither Film Studies (in a Post–Film Studies World)?" and found it disconcerting to read now--I wonder if his final three paragraphs were taken up by the science people?--

Where does this leave us today, and for the foreseeable future? Frankly, as I see it, our situation is precarious indeed. What brought us together as a field, and sustained us for several decades as we eventually succeeded in our mission, was the desire to have cinema recognized as a powerful form of artistic, cultural, and economic expression, with cinema studies consequently recognized as an important, independent academic discipline. For decades, our mentoring activities have concentrated on initiating students into this film studies world. We needed to do this in part because of the disparate fields from which our students hailed. But now the situation has been reversed. Current students come to us already convinced that cinema studies is a strong, serious field of inquiry. Increasingly, our task thus involves training students to handle the plethora of materials that the Internet offers (a task for which we are ill-prepared, I would note, because our own film education stressed cinematic specificity rather than methods for handling the extraordinary variety of materials now available with a few keystrokes). Once centripetal (with film at the center), our task must now be understood as centrifugal. We must, I submit, begin to soft-pedal film specificity and turn instead to training students to handle the new nonfilm resources that now complement increased film availability. This of course means that we must train ourselves to make use of those resources.

When I teach silent film sound, to take just one example, I need to be able to show my students how to locate and analyze not just obvious materials like film scores, but also cue sheets, song slides, sheet music, cylinder recordings, melodrama staging instructions, theater diagrams, radio programs, and a zillion-and-one other resources that I am only beginning to discover. I need to offer my students a model for understanding cinema that is not itself limited to cinema. In short, in order to take full advantage of newly available resources, I need to forget what I learned and what I have been teaching for years.

It is only with some trepidation that I am willing to formulate the strong version of this position: we need to recognize that the film specificity model—however well it has served us—now lies squarely in our way. Once necessary to our very livelihood, the film specificity model must now be discarded. An entirely new task awaits us in the decades to come. Instead of training students to be film scholars, we need to show students how to creatively give up film scholarship in favor of something broader, something more in step with our new resources. It is time to abandon our disciplinary prejudices as film scholars. Welcome to the contradictory future of film studies in a post-film studies world . . .