Subject/Object

So, I have this required class, called Research Methods, which is supposed to instruct one in the ways of evaluating research and designing research proposals. All from a Social Science perspective.

This is fine; I come from Humanities where research involves reading until it is the night before the due date and spewing whatever logical commentary you can get out onto a page. This class is necessary for me, not only because it is a required course but because I need to get at least an A- to do a research project or optional thesis.

However, for some reason the instructor has decided that it is perfectly alright to teach an entire statistics class in 5 weeks, for only 45 minutes each week. So, after talking for 2 and 1/2 hours about research in general, there is a break and then we learn stats for the rest of the extended class.

The problem is now I have an exam on Monday where I have to know 74–yes, seven-four–terms and concepts. And not just definitions: an A level answer will deliver 6-8 sentences on each concept, describing what each is, its context and some problems. An A level answer will go beyond the textbooks assigned to 2-3 other sources. And there is no recommended reading list.

Seventy-four. For all those counting, that is a minimum of 444 sentences I have to come up with. The beauty part is that each test will be a randomized selection of 20 concepts. The test actually consists of a slip of paper with 20 numbers which correspond to the questions you are to do.

The funny thing is, there are no formulas on the test. So, I am really learning 74 concepts which I would still have to go back to a textbook to learn again if I were to ever use them in research design. Pointless. I dislike memorization, my brain does not work that way, and a test which requires the cramming of concepts is a poor indicator of learning. I guarantee you that 20 minutes after I leave the test I will have forgotten every single one of those terms.

What I don’t understand is that my professor seems like a really intelligent guy. I don’t know if I am learning anything from the lectures, but as an individual he is alright. Why he insists on this format and not some short essays which would draw upon more than one of each of these is beyond me.

From somewhere in my Google Reader I got a link to an article called “Say Everything” by Emily Nussbaum from the New York magazine. It documents the usually amazement with the public Internet lives of the younger generation, and in that way the article is not generally amazing itself. I will confess that I didn’t read it all, but that is perhaps maybe because I am part of that generation–at 25, at least the upper half.

Earlier today while working in the library I was listening to a podcast of CBC’s Ideas. It is hard to describe to American friends and colleagues the love many Canadians have for the CBC, but I guess I wouldn’t get NPR as well. You know you are becoming an older member of the Canadian intellectual class when you stop listening to pop music and just tune into CBC radio all day.

In any event, this first part of a two part episode was on the sociologist Richard Sennett, who I had never heard of but had some very interesting ideas about public space and why modern western culture has such a hard time with it. He is influenced by Jane Jacobs, amongst others, and I think I see his work as Jacobs with a lot of historical and cultural studies to support him.

What he was saying is that our level of publicness and privateness can be seen from the little cultural rituals and gestures we preform, and that this level changes throughout history. A lot of the loss of healthy public space he attributes to the influence of early Christianity. He is particularly worried about the fear most westerners have when confronted by a stranger for no good reason, and our particular horror if we were ever to be touched on the wrist or shoulder by a stranger who is looking to talk to us.

But in the 18th Century, or in the Arab world, this is a totally normal occurrence; in fact, in these cultures one goes out of their way to make physical contact before speaking. Similarly, in the 18th Century it was common for women to entertain people while in bed, in the sense of have men and women over, inviting them in as she was getting up, drinking coffee and talking while she brushed her hair or wrote letters. The concept of the bedroom as private space is a creation of the Victorian era (whose prudish attitudes wrecked many, many things in my opinion). Or even the bath, which is the epitome of private personal space, is not so in many cultures where public bathing is the norm.

So, conclusion. When writers are so amazed by the public life we lead on the Internet, it is not something particularly new, but only a return to older forms of public life that were lived in previous times. We have this inheritance from Victorian morality and Christian sensibilities of inwardness and privacy which I don’t think are universal and were not universal throughout time. What we will find is that there is nothing unnatural or scary about living publicly.

“It’s theater, but it’s also community: In this linked, logged world, you have a place to think out loud and be listened to, to meet strangers and go deeper with friends,” writes Nussbaum. True, but it is also a return to a public life we had in the past. Richard Sennett noted that when he started people questioned how the fact that Greeks exercised and bathed naked together could shed light on their political lives. It does shed light, and I think our own publicness does so as well.