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Someone once told me that art, above all, has to be a feast for the eyes.
Are the blind then inherently unable to contribute to art or even FEEL it? I don't think so. Art is art and art is a feast and a toast to life.
You can interpret eyes a little more broadly into all the senses - or perception generally. According to this ideal, art is aesthetically rich, although it doesn't have to be from the visuals. Otherwise, how could music be art?
I think this is where the definition of art changed. Art used to be a craft, a skill, a profession, and usually a form of entertainment. A latin poet's livelihood depended on pleasing either his audience or his patron. But it became about feelings and expression. And disconnected itself from commercial imperatives in many cases. Harry Potter and website design are much closer to what I envision art as, as opposed to what I'd find in a contemporary gallery.
Funny thing because a painter told me that lol. Art is truly an exercise in bias.
Same amount you did that time you came home from work and hallucinated HN was standing in your kitchen wearing nothing but a feather covering his naughty parts.
Are you sure the reason was professor bias, and not that you didn't have the strongest grasp of how grading English papers works? (I'm not attacking you of course pan, but in my own experience many undergrads - particularly those acquainted with scientific objectivity - just don't get how English is evaluated).
The analogy with chemistry, for example, is false. In a textual analysis there is no one right answer that's approached with different methods, there are a plurality of answers that are weighted based on the application of interpretive frameworks and the successful identification of literary devices within the text.
If anything your experience here was more like the chemistry example, since your conclusion was graded more heavily than your methods. But English isn't a discipline that lends itself to objective correctness in the same way a science would, and as such shouldn't be graded like chemistry.
A+
Are you sure the reason was professor bias, and not that you didn't have the strongest grasp of how grading English papers works? (I'm not attacking you of course pan, but in my own experience many undergrads - particularly those acquainted with scientific objectivity - just don't get how English is evaluated).
The analogy with chemistry, for example, is false. In a textual analysis there is no one right answer that's approached with different methods, there are a plurality of answers that are weighted based on the application of interpretive frameworks and the successful identification of literary devices within the text.
If anything your experience here was more like the chemistry example, since your conclusion was graded more heavily than your methods. But English isn't a discipline that lends itself to objective correctness in the same way a science would, and as such shouldn't be graded like chemistry.
A+
I don't know that a liberal arts degree is necessarily useless in the job market depending on what you learn and how rigorous the course was. A quality liberal arts grad should have/be able to:
- The ability to write well and quickly comprehend the salient points of others' writing
- Do fairly advanced math (calculus at least)
- Study effectively and rapidly assimilate new knowledge
- Break down the logic of arguments and objectively evaluate their worth
Those are pretty valuable things to be able to do in any job, but I don't get the sense that most liberal arts grads can do them. Rather, liberal arts seems to be the fallback major of failed engineers and scientists.
Outside of engineering and truly advanced math calculus is actually pretty useless. Algebra based prob and stats are infinitely more practical.
Source: Mathematician/Data Scientist
Outside of engineering and truly advanced math calculus is actually pretty useless. Algebra based prob and stats are infinitely more practical.
Source: Mathematician/Data Scientist
I'll have to cede this argument to you since you probably have a greater range of knowledge but I found this problem when I was taking English classes and there were no identity politics in play.
Actually, it was an interesting dichotomy that I found most off putting - the idea that every argument is acceptable juxtaposed against the grading reality that any argument the teacher disagreed with was wrong even if structured and logically sound. That I couldn't get a unique take from the literature because it didn't resonate with the professor, regardless of how well written it was, while a poorly written piece that matched the professor's ideology would still score well.
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lol.. A-Level(UK context) English is the last time when things like narrative structure, scansion of the verse etc. are taught. Degree level is more or less only about interpretation of the meaning of a text. And in almost cases this involves interpreting the text through modern theory... feminism, postcolonialism etc. These are your "interpretive frameworks". There is no indepedent thinking. Students are given the text and the critical theory and are expected to integrate the two in their essays. Failure to do so results in the work being defined as "writing in a vacuum" or some other buzzword for not having gotten with the program.
I don't know that a liberal arts degree is necessarily useless in the job market depending on what you learn and how rigorous the course was. A quality liberal arts grad should have/be able to:
- The ability to write well and quickly comprehend the salient points of others' writing
- Do fairly advanced math (calculus at least)
- Study effectively and rapidly assimilate new knowledge
- Break down the logic of arguments and objectively evaluate their worth
Those are pretty valuable things to be able to do in any job, but I don't get the sense that most liberal arts grads can do them. Rather, liberal arts seems to be the fallback major of failed engineers and scientists.
Are you sure the reason was professor bias, and not that you didn't have the strongest grasp of how grading English papers works? (I'm not attacking you of course pan, but in my own experience many undergrads - particularly those acquainted with scientific objectivity - just don't get how English is evaluated).
I'm also a working data scientist, and I do agree with you that probability and stats are more useful. Of course, stats implicitly use a lot of calculus when you're defining probabilities using distributions, but that's abstracted from most people using statistics in practice (as are calculus based gradient calculations utilized in gradient descent). In any case, knowing some math is pretty handy.
And personally I think lower level calculus is a lot easier than linear algebra, probability, stats, etc. But different people find different sorts of math difficult.
Funny anecdote you might like: I have a math PhD working for me, and the other day after he did a presentation on a piece of failed analysis (wasn't his fault, the data wasn't there to make a good model IMO) I found him reading a book on Fourier analysis (his dissertation was on harmonic analysis). I asked him why he was reading it and he told me that sometimes he misses the purity of math as opposed to the dirty business of data analysis in the real world. I think he found it comforting.
I would say you are brushing with to broad of brush, when it come to calculus. It is the main math disciple (alongside statistics) when it come to economic or financial analysis.
On that list, why is it that the business and science majors on this board are the worst at #1 and #4, and furthermore even lack the ability to realize they aren't good at them. That lack of self-awareness might be a clue to what makes liberal arts study so crucial.