Curse of the Cool Course

Last semester at the Roosevelt Academy I took a course about 17th-century Dutch painting. It was a great class - so much so that it rarely felt like a class. Mostly, I just felt like I was attending an interesting art lecture, as I have done occasionally in the past, or reading an exhibition guide. I always meant to write a blog entry about the way it felt, but never got around to it.

The problem was that it was hard to get motivated. I felt so laid-back about the whole thing - dark lectures with the paintings lit up on the powerpoint screen and a stream of information flooding in - that I really had to make sure I was thinking about the studying part. And not getting distracted by the interesting bits of historical information that kept cropping up in my reading.

(For example: couples' portraits were often two separate portraits, one of the husband, and one of the wife, with them sort of facing each other, so that they could hang on opposite sides of the fireplace. This was because Dutch houses of the time [holds true today, though] were rather small, and people didn't have a wall that was big enough for a huge double portrait.)

Now I am re-experiencing this phenomenon at Leiden, in the course called "The Manuscript Book in the West".

I never expected to study ancient manuscripts. (If I had, I would have paid a lot more attention in that not-for-credit Latin class I took in my first year at RA.) Yet every Thursday, there I am, in the special manuscript collection section of the university library to spend two hours learning about manuscripts.

And it's the exact same thing. That classes are great. We look at really old books and the teacher tells us how they were made, how they were preserved, how they were marked, and why.

But it really just feels like a trip to the museum (okay, if I was an extra-special, high-profile client), where instead of reading a plaque I hear it from an expert, and there is no glass between the manuscript and me.

I need a switch in my brain. One side would be labeled "Focused Academic Active Listening/Reading/Studying". The other would be "Passive Absorbing Oh-My-Gosh-Isn't-That-COOL?". In this one, you tend to remember the little, fascinating-but-useless bits of information rather than the big picture things and theory that help you pass the test.

Incidentally, the latter one was especially dominant in most of my linguistics courses.