Quantact Wrote:New Yorker is snotty and elitist. I tried to get into it, but it has stuff like "modern poetry," which is really bad most of the time because it tries to be pretentious more than it tries to make pretty sentences out of words. If you look up "The Good Morrow" by John Donne, or some of Emily Dickinson's works, and compare those to the modern poetry in the New Yorker, you will see the difference. Pretentious =/= deep and beautiful.
Ah, but you're attacking the source and its particular style of prose, and not the points brought up by the article in question.
But I will admit that I have a tendency to not read from certain sources given a prior history of strong bias.
Quantact Wrote:So, you'll sometimes have a crappy professor, but you can SEE he's crap. One of my profs in the great school made us read EVERYTHING HE'S EVER WRITTEN. I, at a BA level, write much better than him with his PhD, and in any case, making people in your class read your own stuff is pathetic. I never took anything from his class seriously. Another prof (in the $hitty school) assigned such horrible books that they were almost unreadable, and gave such dull lectures that I learned nothing listening to her for 3 hours at a time; she was rude and condescending. Most professors know their stuff. You sit there and listen to them for a few hours, and you see them using examples, and give interesting lectures, and you KNOW they're the real thing. I cannot really think of a professor I've ever taken who was engaging and a good lecturer, who assigned good books, but who didn't teach me anything.
Can you honestly say whether these teachers then were able to change your mind towards a subject which you've had deep-seated feelings about? It seems that your premises dictate that all of our viewpoints are already formed much earlier in our lives, and that by the time you've reached 18 there's little hope in changing them. Yes, you may form a more complex perspective, but all college has really done is reinforce what was already there. What may have altered your decisions about what was interesting or not was then based on what you already choose to believe, not the quality of teacher.