Your first semester/quarter of graduate school will suck

In an earlier post, I argued that you shouldn’t go to grad school. Assuming some of you assholes completely ignored my advice, in this installment I will explain what happens when you do go to grad school because it’s never too late to decline an offer of acceptance.

Everything is different, and that is terrible

I should start by saying that I like first year grad students. They’re shiny and new and they don’t know what they’ve done to themselves. They’ll often talk about post-modern theory and how excited they are to be among their intellectual peers or some bullshit that everyone else just silently judges them about. Some of them are shy and downright Bambi-esque, which, I add in the most condescending manner possible, is adorable. Every year, I meet the first years and give them some advice that they never listen to, and then I wait about seven weeks. At that point, I walk around my department, just looking for the looks of panic. Around then, there’s always someone at the end of their rope, completely overwhelmed because grad school sucks, especially at the beginning.

Starting at a new school sucks because everything is different, particularly when you first make the transition from undergrad to graduate work. I can only provide examples from my own experience, but I’m sure you’ll find that your first year in grad school will be unhappy for its own reasons.

My university is on the quarter system, which means that everything is ten weeks long and does not correspond well with the schedule of any other students in the world. To begin with, this is why my grandmother will never, ever, ever understand why I don’t visit home until June or why I’m still sitting on my ass in September.

“I’m not sure what you’re doing with your life, but I’m pretty sure it’s because you hate me.”

– the subtext of every phone conversation I’ve ever had with my grandmother

Effectively, we do everything that classes at normal universities do in sixteen weeks, but we have to do in ten. But it’s okay because our classes are longer and we meet more often! This means that there’s no time for adjustment because you begin a quarter and by the time you notice, it’s halfway done and you haven’t started working on your term paper. All the research and writing that most students would have to do is suddenly crunched into a space so short that there’s no time to actually think about it, you just do it.

It’s difficult for anyone to adjust to the quarter system, especially grad students who have to do ten times more work than undergrads. This is particularly true because many new grad students have been at the top of their classes their entire career and may have never had to put in serious hours to get top grades. In fact, that's why they're in grad school. But there’s a bit of a shock when a new grad student discovers that they have to read a book or two a week for each of their classes, which they have trouble doing because they literally don’t know how to read.

I imagine every discipline has a different way of approaching reading, but in history, typically all we’re interested in is the argument the author is making, the evidence they use, and how this argument fits with other arguments in the field. If a history grad student is doing their job correctly, they will read the introduction, conclusion, a review of a book, and then look at a bit of the evidence that the author uses. The whole middle part, you know, where all the history is? Yeah, we ignore that. There are about seven people who want to read any particularly book in its entirety and soak in all the detail that the historian who wrote it spent their life collecting, while the rest of us casually decide whether we buy the argument without actually reading the book. It's our little contribution to making dedicated professionals feel like they've wasted their lives.

This approach feels deeply wrong to new students and anyone who isn’t jaded by years in the academy, so they rebel and actually try to read the whole thing. First off, everyone hates the guy who read the whole book because they’ll bring up an obscure point that no one cares about, so don’t be that guy. Second, first years drive themselves mad trying to slug through all of that material and it will do them precious little good because most professors don’t care about that crap. But if you happen to have one who does, just quit because it’s not worth it.

Perhaps the biggest adjustment that many graduate students have to make, unless they’ve prostituted their souls to the Devil, is that they have to learn to teach. Suddenly, after years of being the smartest kid in the class, who always had something to contribute and was oh-so-self-assure about their cleverness (Jeremy!), new grad students have to stand in front of a class and actually spew forth some crap about their subject matter in a way that tricks new students into feeling like they're learning something. After spending a dozen years watching other people teach and lecture, you’d think that they would have some idea about how to teach. You would, of course, be mistaken.

I distinctly remember standing in front of a class for the first time and having no idea what I was supposed to do. To be fair, I had received a bit of training from the university, which required me to attend three days of instruction on teaching prior to being in a classroom. Each day consisted of four sessions of about an hour each where, I swear to God, something was said about pedagogy, but I have no idea what and I didn’t really care at the time either. At least two hours of that was spent informing me that I was not to sleep with my students, which would have been a complete waste of time, except that I got to hear someone from HR say, “You shouldn’t have a relationship with any of your students, but if you do, wait until the quarter is over. And if you can’t wait, inform HR immediately.” That is literally the only thing I remember about all of the training I received before I started teaching. Almost all teacher training is done in the field, which is a euphemism for "they send you out into the wild with no idea what you're doing and hope that you won't kill someone while they're legally liable for your actions," which, of course, why most pedagogical instruction is on how not to get (the university) sued.

“OH! That’s why 90% of my professors were terrible at their jobs!”

With your newfound insight into how to teach at the university level, you'll start teaching your own class, or, more properly, you'll lead discussion sections wherein you're supposed to go over the readings that the real professor (the one who actually lectures) assigns. Now, having discovered that your own classes required a lot of reading, you will be shocked to discover how little your students will be willing to do given their miniscule workload.

I remember during my first quarter in grad school, a professor assigned a 1,500 page book that I had to read in a week and was only available on two hour closed reserve at the library. I had to spend half the night huddling in the basement of the library with a book large enough to kill a toddler during a tornado, and then turn around the next morning and try to coax toddlers to read 30 pages a week. The upside is that I remember both the Manchu conquest of China in the 17th century and the first time I killed a man just to watch him die very clearly. 

Very few students truly appreciate that their instructors have to do all the reading that they do, and do it ten times better. We have to read the same material for every class, but we read it more thoroughly and more times than they do; for every hour they spend writing a paper, we spend approximately ten trillion hours grading them. Every instructor has to figure out their own way to make it through stacks of papers. My first year, I decided to make a game of it: I kept track of every incompetent use of a rhetorical question. After filling up a sheet of paper, I gave up this game and took up my current grading technique: I keep a bottle of grading whiskey in my cupboard, and I never drink to remember.

That's a graduate student sized bottle of booze, but he's at a party, so clearly he's doing it wrong.

 But even with all of these adjustments, you can’t slack off because…

Your relationship with your professors actually matters this time

Remember undergrad when you did half the reading and then made one comment that kind of made sense and your professor was pleased because your semi-competence dulled the unending pain that is instructing undergrads? Yeah, that’s not going to work anymore. Part of the reason that ever worked is because professors tend to have a lot of students at the lower levels and they're willing to take the smallest accomplishment as a sign of competence. As you advance classes get smaller, so the professors will know everyone in their classes personally and have a better idea of the work they're doing day in and day out, especially because you will end up taking classes with the same four professors for most of your graduate career. These four professors will be on your generals/comprehensive exam committee, so you have to have a good relationship with them or you will never complete your PhD program.

It might not look like it, but this guy derives sustenance entirely from your tears.

 Sure you can sit in a graduate seminar and not say anything and beg off whenever the professor asks you a question. Unlike undergrad where you only needed to impress an instructor enough to give you a decent grade, however, in graduate school your committee members will become the basis of your career, and if you piss even one of them off by doing something stupid like never doing the reading, it can seriously hurt your entire career, or at least make your life sincerely miserable. These professors can actually refuse to sit on your committees (though it’s rare), which they can use as leverage to make you do almost anything they want. I have a friend who had written half a dissertation that his adviser disapproved of, so he had to scrap it and start again because his committee would never let him defend it. A grad student’s job is essentially to impress their committee members, which means that you’re going to try your damnedest to keep up with all the reading and think deep thoughts, but until you get used to the workload (and, more importantly, how to go about it), eventually you will be overwhelmed.

But no matter how overwhelmed you become, there’s one person you must never let down: your adviser. Your relationship with your adviser is one of the most important things in all of graduate school and maybe your entire career. Your adviser should be a wise, experienced hand who can help direct you through your program. They should be a leading expert in your field and specialization, and use their connections to make your entire life easier. Figuring out what your relationship with your adviser is going to be for the next twenty years is tough, but if you fuck it up, you might as well quit. I only know a handful of people who switched advisers during the middle of their degree: for one it went brilliantly and everything in his life was better; for another, things got better but it added half a decade to his completion time; but for a third the adviser divorce is still too painful to discuss. I don’t have a joke for that last one; it was just really terrible.

By the way, speaking of divorce…

Your spouse/partner will resent you

Of course, if you’re married or go to school with a significant other, you will have a companion who won’t challenge you intellectually (unless you’re into that sort of thing) or try to curb stomp you because they don’t like your face (presumably they already like your face otherwise you may have a problem unrelated to grad school). There is a downside, however. Unless your partner is also starting a graduate program or they have a job they instantly love, you’re going to resent the hell out of you.

Many universities are located in places where people specifically do not want to go, which is why the land was cheap enough to waste on high learning instead of corn. You might be willing to go to these places that civilization forgot, but is your partner? Really? No matter how supportive they seem to be of the move to begin with, eventually your spouse is going to resent the fuck out of you for dragging them all the way to Ithaca, New York where there’s nothing but colleges and water features. 

They have a world-class university and the best word play they could come up with is

“Ithaca is Gorges.” On the other hand, that sure is a pretty gorge.

                                               

 The worst part is that they’ll eventually realize that this is the first in a long series of relocations to places they don’t want to be based on where you can get a job. You might think you can hold out for an awesome post in New York or San Francisco, but your career options are limited and someone has to teach in Alabama, and knowing how well you plan your life, it'll probably be you. At least for a while, I should say, because as an academic you're going to have to relocate many times. You and your spouse are just going to have to figure out how to live in several of the many hellholes that 19^th century assholes decided would be a suitable place for a university.

Take Yale, for example. Its founders seem to have decided to locate their university at the intersection of beautiful architecture and surprisingly high street crime. I promise you, New York City is not as accessible as everyone told you at visitation day.

Or Dartmouth, which is an Ivy League school, even though you don’t think it is. Well-known fact: no one of any consequence has ever gone to Dartmouth. If they had been consequential, they wouldn’t have gone to Dartmouth. Some would argue that the previous statements are rhetorically begging the question, but if you're one of them, you probably didn't go to Dartmouth because Dartmouth alums don't know what that means.

If somehow you get over the stress of your first year and absolutely love graduate school, you'll still have to deal with a partner who hates the fact that they have to live in the middle of nowhere and who is essentially relying on you as a meal ticket when you seriously have no chance of making real money in academia. Just remember Doctor Strife’s Law: If you love something, something else will ruin it for you.

Or someone

Corollary to Doctor Strife’s Law: Even if something is ruined,

it probably won’t blow up because that’d be awesome.

 But at least those of you who are married have someone because otherwise…

You won’t know anyone

If you go to grad school stag, unless you stay at your undergrad or go to your hometown for grad school, you’re going to have to move to a new city and won’t know anyone. Sure, you've probably done that before for college, but there are two big differences: instead of an incoming class of thousands, there will be a small class of first years in your department and you’re old enough that you won’t want to put up with the bullshit involved in meeting new people. My university has a massive history department, with over a hundred grad students on campus any given year and an annual incoming class of about 25-30. So, I had two choices: meet new people somehow (no one ever manages to do this) or hope that I got along with my fellow first years.

Now, I absolutely fell in love with some of my starting class, and we remain close friends to this day, but maybe one of them is the type of person I would typically have hung out with in other circumstances. My friends consisted of: a former gymnast whose idea of a pick-up line was “So, can we just make out already;” a dynamic Ivy League go-getter who knew Paul Kennedy’s preferences for port (Paul Kennedy is a historian who no one has ever heard of, but is important because he wrote a book no one reads); a woman who, when I first met her, was talking about how much better the club scene was back home; and a nerd whose social activities consisted of playing board-based role playing games and claiming he had a girlfriend in Canada (they subsequently married, but you wouldn’t have heard about it because it was in Canada).

Our personalities were so diverse that we should have been able to summon a cartoon super-hero with our nerd powers (I would have called him Captain History, and I would have loved him best of all, but his existence would have gotten me beaten up, and deservedly so). I distinctly remember one night at a bar when my super-nerdy friend commented that we drank a lot in grad school, which prompted me to say, “Unless you’re going out without me, that is your second beer of the week.” It turned out, for him, that was a lot of drinking, whereas the rest of the table started wondering if he was a secret Mormon. We were all somewhat out of our social comfort zone, and aside from our unbearable whiteness, the only thing we had in common was our subject of study… though one of us was Spanish, which is kind of like the Olive Garden of diversity.

“Soup and non-offensive white bread for everyone!”

I feel like Olive Garden should be paying me for… something here.

At this point, I feel that I should explain how this group of people came together. At the beginning of the year, our department used to have a reception in the faculty club that everyone attended specific because there was an open bar (now we have a picnic where we can bring our families, which means I have to stand around with people I work with, but without booze and with small children). I literally walked up to a group of people because I had seen one of them once before. We spoke briefly (like ten minutes) and because it was the most fulfilling human contact I had had with other human beings in two weeks, I suggested we should all get lunch together because I was so desperately lonely. Random permutations of that group (based on who was in town) continued to meet for lunch once a week for five years and formed the backbone of my entire social circle. 

You pretty much have to make friends in your incoming class, but the adjustment to new types of people is stressful, particularly when you basically have to find a friend among a small group of people because you will not meet anyone outside your program unless you take classes in other department or have discernible social skills.

One of these is more likely than the other

Having friends in grad school, however, is essential to making it through any program, and, in some cases, it is literally the only thing keeping grad students from hanging themselves with their shower curtain.

This kid knows what I’m talking about

 Your very presence may cause tension

There are two ways for to attend grad school: either you teach for the university or you have a fellowship, which is when someone (the university, government, private foundation, etc.) pays your tuition and gives you money to study. Fellowships are great because they mean you won’t have to teach for a year and someone is giving you money for what you would have done anyway. For incoming students, fellowships are typically offered to the most promising students as a way of enticing them to a specific university.

 
Given that the university considers these students the best, you’d think they’d do better than all the schmucks who have to teach (we already discussed why that’s world-destroyingly soul-crushing), but year after year, in my department teaching assistants have a higher retention rate than the fellows. Pretty much everyone agrees that it’s because the TAs are required to spend time in the communal grad student offices, are forced to work with other grad students in their teaching duties, and are generally more socially connected. The fellows, on the other hand, sit alone in their apartments, reading and slowly descending to a pit of madness of their own creation.

The issue of who gets a fellowship and who has to teach can sometimes be tricky, especially because after five years of grad school, on the whole I'm not convinced that people coming in on fellowships are really any better than those who had to teach their first year. Ever year, amazing and deserving grad students get passed over for fellowships, but that doesn't make them any less deserving or lovable... I keep telling myself.

First years are almost no one is petty enough to make any distinction between these two groups and holds grudges against someone for getting an incoming fellowship when they didn't. It's not like TAs and fellows are the Jets and the Sharks, with the Sharks getting paid to do nothing while the Jets had to work their way through school. Sure, I've witnessed some snap-based combat in grad school, but it was almost always in the medium of "Yo' mamma" jokes.

"Yo' mamma is so dumb she went to a state school!" "This will not stand sir! To fisticuffs!" "Indeed! Now, how exactly do we go about this?"

 There are, naturally, exceptions, like me because I'm a bad person. When I first started, I couldn't figure out what fellowship students had that I didn't. Half of my friends in my first year had fellowships while I was stuck teaching, but one of them was not like the others. I met this one woman at the reception I mentioned above, and I commented that I hadn't met her before at any of the teaching orientations. She said she was on a "diversity enrichment fellowship," which is to say, a fellowship for minority students. I was perplexed because she was easily as white as I, so I mustered up the courage and asked what ethnicity she was, to which she cheerfully responded that she was Spanish.

Now, to be clear, I generally approve of affirmative action, and this woman proved to be brilliant and she absolutely deserved a fellowship, no question in my mind. But Spanish, as in from Western Europe, and minority did not go well together in my mind. Incredulous, I said, quite rudely, "Yes, well, in that case, I'm a minority as well, I'm Irish." My new friend became quite excited and exclaimed, "Me too!" At this point, I felt entirely cheated because, being Irish-German, I got screwed out of a fellowship because my father chose a woman from on the wrong side of France. By the way, my Spanish is better than my Spanish friend's.

These petty divisions abound in a place where funding decisions seem entirely arbitrary, and every new student that's added to the department essentially means that funding will not go to a more advanced student who just needs another quarter or two to finish their dissertation. In fact this is a large part of the reason that I say your choices of friends are largely limited to incoming students; the established students already have friends and kind of resent incoming students on general principle.

In other words, good luck because everyone already hates you before you even show up for your first day of class.

The stupidest thing a student has ever said to me

I sat down and thought about what the stupidest thing a student ever said to me. It took a while to get there because students regularly say dumb things, particularly when they try to explain to me why I "need" to offer them a chance at "extra" credit. 

The problem is that there are different categories of stupid things. There's the mundane sin of not paying attention. Invariably, if I announce the due date of a paper or exam, invariably someone is going to ask me to repeat myself five times. This might seem to be stupidity, but it's actually stupidity's lay-about cousin, laziness.

I’m not going to class today because I honestly don’t know if I ever enrolled…

There’s stupidity about the subject matter. Now, I want to be clear: I do not hold my students responsible for knowing all of the subject matter right away; after all, that’s what my class is for: learning. I do hold my students responsible for knowing basic facts of the world that they need to be aware of in order to continue breathing.

Oh! It’s in and then out.

I’ve had my share of students who didn’t bring pens to exams, couldn’t figure out how to take notes during class, and didn’t realize that a room that’s numbered in the 200s would be on the second floor. I’ve had students who couldn’t find England on a map (it’s the fucking island!), and one time I had a student confuse Poland and Switzerland and then try to explain the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact to me (don’t bother looking it up, just believe me when I say it’s stupid).

But after much consideration, and I think I found the winner: "I already knew all the stuff you said about the [Great] Depression. You need to come up with some new facts."

At first, this may not seem so stupid, but these few words say so much. Upon reading them, it became crystal clear to me that this student clearly didn’t understand A.) what an introductory survey class is for, and B.) how history works.

So, he already knew everything I had to say about the Depression. How utterly, utterly tragic. I had tried a new, novel, and exciting approach to the Depression, wherein I told my students what happened during the Depression and its effects on history. Of course I should have realized that little Frankie or Bobby or whoever-the-fuck already knew all about that, so I should have skipped it, leaving a Hitler shaped hole in WWII because cause and effect should be ignored when one kid in my class already knew the score.

To be honest, I have lost all goddam perspective on what anyone knows about history. I have spent ten years pursuing degrees in the subject and had an interest in it before going to college. The idea that my students have no fucking clue who Napoleon is, other than the fact that he was short (by the way, he was actually my height, a gentleman’s 5’ 9’’) is fucking horrifying beyond belief to me. Random student, you already know what happened in the goddamn Depression? Good! You get a goddamn gold star for not being a complete brain-dead moron. I’m still going to spend twenty minutes going over the relevant stories and statistics because there’s some drooling idiot, probably sitting in the back taking a nap under a damn baseball cap, the wearing of which in a classroom is the universal sign of disinterest in learning, who might not know, so shut the fuck up and let me teach so that someone doesn’t go into a voting booth thinking, “What’s so bad about a depression anyway? It’s just a bunch of lazy people who don’t want to work.”

If I could teach a class with the assumption that my students already know the basic material so that we can do something interesting, that’d be fan-fucking-tastic. But as it is, I’m a graduate student, which means I won’t do anything interesting until I finish my dissertation, so I’m stuck teaching the basics that people should already know from being alive during high school (and if your high school didn’t offer European history, you live in a backwards, fucking hick state and should have seen to your own education by reading a book at some point before deciding you wanted to go to college because you can’t blame your ignorance on the fact that you grew up in Kansas forever).

Having said all of that, I totally sympathize with this kid on the second account. That’s totally how I want history to work: when things are boring, I want to be able to come up with new facts. That’s the model Fox News works on if you replace boring with “liberal bias.”  The Depression, though one of the most important things in 20th century history, is both boring and, quite surprisingly, soul-crushingly sad. This kid doesn’t want to hear the same old things over and over about the Depression because he knows that stuff, and, presumably, is so jaded that he can’t be moved by the same old song and dance about how no one could afford bread and a third of everyone was unemployed. He wants to hear something new and novel about the Depression because that’s the only way he can muster up enough interest to listen to a lecture.

Being a nice guy, I’d like to help him out by offering some new [entirely true!*] facts about the Depression:

• So many longshoremen were laid off in New York that you could cross the Hudson River to New Jersey on their backs by starting a rumor that there was a ship coming into Newark that needed to be unloaded; one eminent historian has dubbed this phenomenon "the Hoover Bridge."
• The price of bread grew so dear in Manchester, that the only way people could afford it was by selling Irish into slavery; at its peak, bread cost three Irishmen a loaf, but you couldn’t get change for a half loaf.
• Between 1931 and 1937, unemployment for dragons was 98% (most expect it to be 100%, but there were Chinese women in racist cartoons who were called “The Dragon Lady” and found steady employment throughout that period).
• Japan did surprisingly well during the Depression, during which they spun record amounts of silk and sold it to spiders; as a result, unemployment among spiders skyrocketed, leading to mass spider suicides, mostly consisting of spiders crawling into people’s mouths while they slept.
• So many Parisians were starving during the Depression that the government briefly made it legal to hunt mimes. Parents who wanted to eat their children would force them to dress up in white face and striped shirts, saying it was “for the good of the nation.”

There you go, random student, new facts about the Depression! I hope that enriched your learning experience.

Teaching World History

This summer, I will be teaching modern world history for the first time. This is a Herculean task considering that I have problems teaching Eastern or Western history in ten weeks, the length of a quarter at my university, and I will be teaching it during an abbreviated four and a half week half term.

After a week of attempting to prepare a syllabus for this class, I have concluded that the task is impossible. Not in the way that two fermions with identical spin can’t exist in the same space. Rather, it can be accomplished fairly easily if you do a half-assed job, but it simply impossible to do well. At least for me. I think there are about five people on the planet who are qualified to do it, and I’m certainly not one of them.

And, as you might recall, this asshole has tenure.

The typical modern world history course seems to consist of European history plus whatever the instructor happens to have taken a field in; in my case, this is East Asian history, which is what I actually study. I have taught both European and East Asian history many, many times, but, if I’m honest, I’m not even competent enough to teach about the history of all the countries in those areas.

When anyone asks me about the history of Vietnam, for instance, I will say, “I know literally nothing about that,” which is a lie because I have literally never used the word literally correctly.

Via The Daily Mail

I kept yelling “I’m literally covered in bees!” until someone pointed out that they could see my hands.

                                 

My course of study gives some authority to talk about China, Japan, Britain, France and Germany in a serious way, sometimes Russia plus the Netherlands and Italy during very specific eras. Sure those are the places where important stuff actually happened, but there are a dozen countries whose existence I’m only vague aware of. What I know about Polish history is literally a joke (unfortunately, that joke is about the Holocaust, so I can’t even tell it). Iberia, the Balkans, and Scandinavia, and, all solidly in Europe, are rather fuzzy in my mind with the exception of the voyages of exploration, the origins of World War I, and Ikea respectively.

Having said that, the phrase “I know nothing about that” when it comes from a graduate student often means something more akin to “all I know about that is what I learned in a survey class six years ago and I’m afraid someone in the room might actually know what they’re talking about.” I once actually did tell someone that I knew nothing about Vietnam, and then spent the next twenty minutes explaining Chinese political and cultural influence on Vietnam two thousand years ago, but that was only because there was no one else in the room.

Unfortunately I forgot to account for the ninja historian who hides in my classroom, always waiting for me to make the slightest mistake…

If you ask any teacher in the humanities or social sciences, they will tell you that they have to teach classes that cover material that they were never trained in and really don’t know enough to teach, but you might have to get them drunk before they'll admit it. 

"All I know is that I know nothing... and that I'm going to have to run out on this tab because I don't get paid until the end of the month."

There are three common ways of dealing with this issue. 1.) You can read up on all the topics that you don’t know enough about. This is obviously the best way to do things, but, as a corollary, it is also the hardest. It takes a grad student years of studying to become competent enough to take the general exams that qualify him or her to teach a subject, and it'll take a lot of time to become competent in a subject that will never really be of use outside of teaching a class you hate because it’s a survey that only the dumbest of freshmen take. 

2.) You can read the textbook you assigned and hope no one asks questions. The major advantage here is that you only have to read one book and be slightly more competent than an undergrad.

Meet the enemy. Do you think you can outwit these guys? 
If not, quit now.

There is the risk that one of your students will actually know something about the subject, but this can be handled neatly by stating “Oh, I’ve never heard that” or “Hmm… let me get back to you on that.” Unfortunately, if you keep saying those types of things, your students will think you're an idiot, though this may not matter to you because I, for one, have never cared about anything an undergrad has ever said to me.

3.) Finally, you can skip anything you don’t know about, and if asked, you can say that there’s not enough time to cover all the relevant material. I already mentioned that I know nothing about Iberia, Scandinavia, or the Balkans, so I leave them out because I apparently have problems with peninsulas. 

And not just the ones that resemble continental wangs.

                                               

Fortunately, I can get away with not teaching about most of those places because no one notices their absence in a European history course, which, from an objective standpoint, is really, really horrifying. It’s like teaching English and leaving out adverbs. Well, we’re talking about the Balkans, so I guess it’s more of an adjective.  

I have all of these holes in my knowledge-base, and that’s within one of my fields of study.  Now extend that to the world, which, in case you hadn’t noticed, is quite large.

Jesus, is it getting bigger?? Since when has there been a New Zealand?  More pressingly, where’s the old one? Wikipedia tells me it’s in Denmark, which makes even less sense to me.

I guess know enough about Europe and East Asia to teach them. So, all that leaves is South Asia, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and Western Asia (the Middle East)… in Eurasia. Let’s not forget about all of the Americas, Australia, and Africa (in summary, I know nothing about anything about geographic regions that start with an A). And Africa is fucking killing me. I mean, look at it! It’s the second largest continent, and it has about five distinct historical and geographic regions, regions so diverse that talking about “sub-Saharan Africa” is practically a racist way of pretending that “those people” are all the same. 

I told my grandfather about my problem teaching African history, and he said, “All you need to know is that they’re all crazy.” But I keep using this picture of a Zulu warrior as my go to image for racism, so which one of us has a problem?

Hell, I feel racist saying that there are five regions because I’m certain it’s way more complex than that, but I don’t have enough time in a ten week course (condensed to four and half weeks!) to actually deal with any of that complexity. I don’t even have time to read up on the complexity in order to feel guilty about not teaching it. I’m just going to have to assure my students that Africa is more than just an object on which other cultures act. But in the end, I will discuss Africa during the slave trade and the age of high imperialism. I’m afraid I won’t make it to decolonization and my students will think that all Africa needs to end the conflicts is independence.

Yes. After decolonization, there were never any other problems in Africa.

Part of the problem is that there are really two types of history: the history that you find in textbooks and what real historians do. Textbook history takes huge debates and reduces them to two sentences that make one side of contentious issues seem like fact and make generalizations that make experts grind their teeth, all of which is stripped of its evidential basis so that you can’t evaluate anything.

I once screamed at a textbook for claiming that Confucianism was a religion before realizing I was insane.

Textbooks work fine if you know absolutely nothing about a subject or need a very wide angle view. It's not how history really works. Real history is full of footnotes, (usually) cleverly disguised trash talk about other scholars, and more detail than anyone really wants. As a lecturer, I like to know at least something more than what the textbook says so that I can address the big debates and answer student questions. The problem is that there’s no way to learn enough about any one subject to be able to answer all the students’ dumb-ass questions, and after the third disciplinary hearing, I decided that, “I have absolutely no idea what the population of Equatorial Guinea was in 1810, stop asking stupid things you big-eyed freak!” is not a good way of addressing queries. Now expand the subject matter from one or two area you spent years reading about to everything that’s happened in the history of the world. At that scale, I can’t even figure out the contours of the major issues, at least not in the two weeks I have left before the class begins.

Obviously, I could skip everything I don’t know about, but this leaves me feeling like a bad person for skipping all those unique snowflakes of civilizations, especially because the vast majority of the people I’m skipping will be brown. Whether I like it or not, world history for the past five hundred years was heavily shaped by Europeans, whose history I once summarized as follows: "Starting in the 16^th century, Europeans discovered there was a profit in killing, subordinating, and enslaving brown people. Then, for a couple of hundred years, Europeans killed each other over religion, but then they became Enlightened, so they killed each other over who was the most Enlightened. Eventually, they decided to go back to doing what they do best: taking advantage of brown people, though in the twentieth century they went back to killing each other, this time for no reason whatsoever. At this point, the brown people said ‘nuts to this’ and we had decolonization." 

I used to use the Socratic Method, but after years of teaching experience, now I use the “I Don’t Give a Fuck” Method.

Portraying brown people as victims and lacking freewill in their own history is wrong and Eurocentric, which is a word that non-European historians use as a defense mechanism when they’re bored or feel their own research is being ignored by their department.

“Your presentation is very interesting, but now I want to ask a completely unrelated question that will allow me to talk about my own research at great length much to the dismay of the grad students in the back who are only here for the free bagels.”

Besides, skipping any one culture inevitably opens the door to students of that ethnicity complaining that their history got left out. According to this type of student, every single topic we discuss in class perfectly relates to their obscure homeland.

           

"Yes, I’m sure they had trade in Mauritius, random student, now could you kindly tell me where the fuck that is?"

To be perfectly clear, I am a white American academic, which means that I do not really have a desire to interject my ethnic pride into everything. Half of my family is Irish and I feel a loose connect to my Irish ethnicity. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned the existence of Ireland in a classroom, and if I have, it was almost certainly a less than complimentary discussion of potatoes. The other half of my family comes from Alsace, which you may know as the cause of, like, half the wars in European history.

Although no one knows “who will die for Danzig”, apparently everyone in Germany and France was willing to die for the vineyards of my ancestral homeland.

Even though competing French and German claims to Alsace plays a vital role in the Franco-Prussian War and World War I, I don’t mention it in my European history classes because it just doesn’t matter enough. 

Regardless of all of my trouble organizing my class, ultimately I'm sure I'll fall back on the most important lesson I learned from undergrad: if I leave it to the night before it's due, I'll probably do a decent job in spite of all of my procrastination.

I hate my cat

I hate my cat.

This guy. Yeah, fuck him.

I suspect that point needs clarification. Cat people always argue that I couldn't possibly hate my cat because he's so damn fluffy. And they're right. But only because he's not technically my cat.  Not in the 'you can't own an animal' kind of way, either. I've owned the hell out of some animals, with ownership here being defined as being the person primarily responsible for picking up its shit. He's not my cat in the 'my roommate’s freeloading girlfriend insists that she'll move out if her can't live here in spite of the fact that I'm allergic' sort of way. And I hate him, but not just for that.

This is not to say that I hate cats, which is apparently a distinction people have trouble making, so I’ll illustrate it with this Venn diagram:

I would add so much more to the "Things I hate" category, but there are limits to the visualization power of computers.

I loved my first roommates cats that I lived with before. One of them was old, blind, and brain damaged from the time someone sat on her head when she was a kitten. Mahena was a being of pure, malevolent evil. She has been known to sit in front of a water bowl and deny other animals, including multiple dogs, the right to drink from her water. She would take a swipe at anything that moved near her, and she regularly sat on the head of the other cat that lived with me. But she was my little girl, and I loved her. She would sleep on my bed all day, and wake me up for pets in the middle of the night by nudging me and onomatopoeically purring (which is to say she said “purr” rather than doing it). One time she even tried to give me a little kitty handjob.

Lesson learned? For cats, dicks = pincushions.

I put up with the fur, the allergies, and the fact that they fought like, well, cats. But I still liked them. Well enough. But not this cat. He doesn’t even have a single name because his terribleness can’t be contained by just one. His owner calls him Sherman (which is a stupid name for a cat), I called him Oscar for a while, and  my other roommate decide that “Bitch Face” was much more appropriate. For the most part, we call him “cat,” but recent evidence suggests that his true name is Mr. Snuggles. Since this is the most degrading option, it’s the one I use.

Why I hate him:

1.) He’s just made of ginger and awful

Mr. Snuggles is a demanding son of a bitch. He decides what he wants and he finds a way to get it. Most of the time this is about food. When anyone cooks chicken, he saunters into the room, and starts a complicated weaving through the cook’s legs, in an attempt to murder someone so that he can both get chicken and human eyeballs (I am convinced, above all else, that the cat wants to eat my face). When that doesn’t work, he just stares at you:

Mr. Snuggles demands chicken. His desires don’t even make it halfway through the first line of the Meow Mix song!

And it bothers me when he just looks at me. Look at this picture again:

See how imperious he is, right down to his little bitch face, which is one of his dominant features (bitch-facedness, which I didn’t even know was a thing until I lived with him)? That is a look that just screams “I’m better than you, so you’d better pet me,” but…

2.) You can’t pet him without body armor

To further his attempts to get my eyeballs, the cat is slowly trying to turn me into furniture, you know, the kind with a massaging option. Occasionally, he’ll hop on the couch, lie down next to me, put his paws on my forearm, and look at me in a pleading manner that I’ve dubbed “pet the kitty.” If I pet him when he does this, he’ll be happy for five minutes, then he’ll roll on his belly. At this point, I need to stop petting him because after a minute of petting his belly, he’ll bite me.

 “I wuv you! And now Imma gunna fucking eat you.”

If I don’t throw him against the wall at that point, he’ll start scratching. That’s right: he begs for attention and then gets so happy that he draws blood. You know what else does that? Nothing! Nothing else does that! Maybe if there were a mosquito hooker, but I like to think I’d get more out of that exchange.

If I give up on common sense all together and attempt to pet him, he will usually start by licking my hand. At first I thought this was a sign of affection, but soon grew to realize that he’s cleaning me so that I don’t touch his glorious mane with my grimy hands. If he doesn’t clean me first, he’ll instantly start cleaning himself after being pet. There’s nothing like obsessive sanitation procedures to let you know that you’re only as loved to the degree that you adhere to health codes.

Then again, maybe he has a point.

His favorite thing in the whole wide world seems to be when he licks my hand and then I rub that bit at the top of his head that he can never quite reach. That’s right, he’s turned me into an organic loofa.

3.) He has a little bitch voice

I once read an article that cats can meow at the same frequency as a crying baby, a frequency that they find through trial and error until they discover the most effective way of getting you off the couch. Mr. Snuggles doesn’t sound like a crying baby, but he seems to know what types of sounds push my buttons. He usually meows to get me to let him outside. He used to be allowed to go out on the balcony where he’d lord over the flies and moths that were drawn by the light at night. Our intrepid hunter killed so many moths that he earned himself the epithet of “Mothbane” and a sour stomach. Cat is liked to eat all the bugs he could find, which made him sick all over my carpet, so he’s no longer allowed outside.

But in his heart, his cold, black and ginger heart, he knows that if he bothers me enough, I’ll let him outside. At first I could just raise an item over my head and make a throwing motion to scare him off, but he quickly learned that I would not throw some things, like my remote, leading him to look at what I had in my hand before running off. So, every day it’s a struggle between whether he gives up meowing or I run out of things to throw, and I lose every single time because he’s a persistent mother fucker. In the end, I have to get up to pick something up to throw at him. At one point I adopted the use of a squirt bottle, but he no longer fears of it unless I can squirt him in the face. I am surprisingly good at hitting a cat in the face with a stream of water from fifteen paces.

And it’s not just when he wants to go out or show his hatred of me, he is loud and obnoxious all the time. Mr. Snuggles was neutered when he was very young, and like most neutered toms, Mr. Snuggles has a little bitch voice. It’s just so… God dammit.

4.) He’s cute, and he goddam knows it

I spend most of the time working at home, only occasionally going to campus to teach class and abuse copier privileges. Well… truth to be told, I spend most of my time on the same spot on the couch in front of the tv, only occasionally getting up to go to the bathroom. The cat also spends most of his day at home, and while my roommates are out, he won’t shut up. I spend most of the day growing increasingly furious. When his owner gets home, I tell her what an asshole her cat is, and he instantly flomps on his side and uses his cuteness to overcome her sensibilities, which aren’t all that great to begin with.

 Cute, maybe, but not so bright.

In fact, my roommate is incapable of disciplining him at all. I get that you can’t really discipline a cat, not properly, but she doesn’t even try because he’s “so damn fluffy!” All of this sounds like a complaint about my roommate, but the fact of the matter is that he knows that he’s bulletproof. He will actually space out his obnoxiousness and intersperses it with shows of cuteness and affection. If other animals learn his tactics, we will soon be overrun.

5.) He’ll only let me pet him when no one else is home

It turns out these pet me/bite you/grooming sessions are quite intimate because nine times out of ten, Mr. Snuggles will only play “pet the kitty” when no one else is home. I believe he does this because he hates me and will only deign to ask for attention if there’s no one better, and he wants to make sure that no one can hear me scream.

On rare occasions, he falls asleep in my lap before he thinks to play with my blood. This would be very sweet and endearing, but the second he hears someone turning the doorknob, he gets off of my lap and pretends that he wants nothing to do with me. So, even if I wanted anything to do with him, he’s made it clear that he’s a fair weather friend at best and a vampire at worst.

Obviously, it could be worse.

“Pet the kitty” isn’t the only thing he does differently when I’m alone with him. He yowls constantly when his mistress isn’t home, and he redoubles his show of misery when both of my roommates are gone. The yowling sounds like he’s lonely and he’s looking for someone to love him, so when only one of my roommates is gone, the other will call out to the cat, which will prompts him to trot off to find his buddy. When I’m alone, I will tell the cat that he’s not alone because I’m there. At that point, he invariably stops, considers me, and then starts yowling twice as loud, even after I rubbed him with his own saliva.  

6.) He fucking hates me

I’m sure there’ll be some deranged maniacs who will read all of this and conclude that Mr. Snuggles loves me and we’re cute together when we play. I assure you, this is not the case. To illustrate this point, I have included a log I kept last year when my roommates went away for a week.

Day 1: Cat is largely unaffected. He doesn't seem to notice that they're gone, though he does occasionally look at the door, presumably anticipating their return. I don't have the heart to tell him they won't be back until Monday.

Day 2: Cat has noticed that Something Is Wrong. He "ma-rrow"s nearly nonstop, stalking from room to room trying to find someone who isn't me. He clearly has no interest in interacting with me, scratching at me after I pick him up and refusing to play with his toys. He sleeps fitfully, and only in places where he can keep an eye on both his jailer and the door.

Day 3: I woke up this morning to find the cat on my bed, staring at me with disdain. I get the feeling he slept with me and hates himself for it. Once I got up, and went to watch some tv, he curled up in my lap for forty-five minutes while I pet him absently. When I got up, he gave me something the look akin to that of someone with Stockholm syndrome crossed with a victim of domestic abuse. He no long looks at me and seems to be pretending his extended fit of purring while I stroked him never happened. Rather he focuses all of his attention on the door. He seems to miss being with anyone who isn't me.

Day 4: Cat assaulted me upon returning from the store. After attacking my feet a couple of times, he strode about MA--RRROWing with a ferocity seldom expressed by one so furry. I eventually discovered he was out of food and had maliciously knocked over his water dish. Expecting a jailbreak, I attended him very cautiously.

When I was done, he continued to follow me, loudly meowing and refusing to eat. At this point I realized he wanted me to clean up after him: he had vomited a foot from the food bowl and refused to eat while it was there. After he consumed two bits of kibble, he disappeared, only to return more incensed than ever, running around and making a racket. Upon investigating, I discovered he was taking a post-bathroom victory lap to celebrate the fact that he had, once again, gotten a human to clean up after his shit. I can no longer tell which of us is the prisoner. I sleep with my door locked and a knife clutched in my fist.

Day 5: My decision to not talk to the cat anymore has produced interesting results. On the one hand, I anthropomorphize him a lot less, but on the other hand, it has led to a lot more contentious staring and I can feel his hatred of me brimming over. Regardless, I can't let him win this one.

Day 6: The cat is up to something. The other day I woke up and could hear him purring from the other room; when I approached him, he rolled over and showed me his belly. His uncharacteristic happiness has led me to believe he has stolen someone's soul. This bears further observation. I fear it’s mine.

Day 7: Last night, the cat hid in my room as I prepared for bed, which led to him being shut in my room. He snuck up on me as I was half asleep. He put his face near mine and started to purr. He kneaded my side and then curled up on my chest and slept there. I was too afraid to move for much of the night. Today he follows me everywhere, and sleeps near me. He meows constantly when I'm out of his sight. It has become clear that the cat's madness is presenting in a disturbing new way: if I didn't know better, I would say that he now loves me. Lacking his usual source of comfort and affection, he is using me as a surrogate. Until his mistress returns, he is mine. God help us both.

Day 8: My roommates have return. Once they opened the door, my buddy forgot about our long struggle through detente and toward friendship. Where once he purred at the touch of my hand or even at a casual glance, he is now cold and distant. When we cross paths in the hallway, he doesn’t even look at me anymore. My conscious mind struggles to ascribe meaning to the events of the past week, but deep down I know the truth: it’s Chinatown.