...of charm and strange: the blog

So, I hated my new film instructor before I even met him.

Before our first class session, he sent out an email saying, "I've scheduled required weekly meetings for essential film screenings, in addition to the hours listed in the course description you signed up for." So he totally fucking ambushed us with this, which might even be okay with me if this additional class session wasn't scheduled for the same two hours that I'm in one of my comparative literature classes. I'm actually required to be in two places at once.

When I called him on this, he pretty much said, "Too bad. You're in the minority, so you'll have to rent the movies on your own time, and by the way, some of them aren't available to rent, but have I mentioned you're in the minority and don't matter?"

After sitting through one of his classes, I can already tell that this is going to be one of those classes that I tell horror stories about later. And during. This is another problem with majoring in cinema studies: you could cut the pretentiousness in the room with a knife. No, that's wrong. The pretentiousness in the room was so thick, you couldn't cut it with a knife. You couldn't cut it with a diamond. It was like a whiteout: I couldn't see five inches in front of my face. The pretentiousness was obscuring my vision.

Also, the instructor kept stating his interpretations as fact, telling us that it would be "almost impossible not to see it that way," inviting the class to share their thoughts, then responding by treating them like they're such lunatics for seeing it that way. I think it's because he's so young (probably not much older than me). I think he's so pleased to have been given a class that has to listen to his analyses that he's forgetting to do the whole "there's no 'right' answer" schtick that older professors who are more secure in their knowledge remember to do.

That's just my interpretation. But I think it would be almost impossible not to see it that way.