Reading the outdated science and chemistry stuff actually really works for a while, because what you're doing is the history of science and thought really -- freshman/sophomore year is the undeclared History of Atomic Theory -- and you can see how scientific theory actually evolves through the centuries and how it gets to Copernicus basically being able to flip Ptolemy around and go "Ah, yes." And Newtonian physics is still pretty accurate in its context. Lavoisier in particular has a lovely translation in the Dover edition and after you've slogged through a lot of nonsense about the aether, reading his theories about "fucking the air out of the tube" (there's an SJC t-shirt with the long s on it) is kind of delightful.
But the SJC lab equipment was HORRIBLE, at least when I was there, and if you don't have any experience in physics experiments, it's extremely frustrating. What actually really didn't work was junior year, you study electricity and magnetism -- and electromagnetism -- leading up to Maxwell's equations, and that was hard as fuck and you study from a lab manual written by the faculty, not a textbook, and lots of people dropped out rather than face it because that's also the year you read basically nothing other than Kant and Hume and a lot of hardcore political theory. Hobbes, Smith, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, I could go on. Most of that seemed really fucking useless to me, because it was all written in jargon and as far as I can tell 20th century philosophy turned into a total dead end and why do you only get to read THREE novels that year?? Even if one of them is Don Quixote.
(NOT THAT I'M BITTER.)
The bigger controversy re SJC is they don't track classes in which you do need actual training and can't just sit there doing the blind elephant thing -- you know, like math, language, lab, even some music reading/analysis -- and that's even before getting into the fact that even if you don't sacrifice the whole Great Books idea, there are many women and POC authors they're just ignoring, like Frederick Douglass for example -- I didn't get to read his autobiography til I was in a grad school Early AmLit class, and it just knocked me out. It would fit perfectly into the Program! But they'll never add it. They do have optional classes ("preceptorials") and all-college seminars which are much, much more diverse, but they're not part of the core.
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Date: 2021-12-11 09:11 pm (UTC)But the SJC lab equipment was HORRIBLE, at least when I was there, and if you don't have any experience in physics experiments, it's extremely frustrating. What actually really didn't work was junior year, you study electricity and magnetism -- and electromagnetism -- leading up to Maxwell's equations, and that was hard as fuck and you study from a lab manual written by the faculty, not a textbook, and lots of people dropped out rather than face it because that's also the year you read basically nothing other than Kant and Hume and a lot of hardcore political theory. Hobbes, Smith, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, I could go on. Most of that seemed really fucking useless to me, because it was all written in jargon and as far as I can tell 20th century philosophy turned into a total dead end and why do you only get to read THREE novels that year?? Even if one of them is Don Quixote.
(NOT THAT I'M BITTER.)
The bigger controversy re SJC is they don't track classes in which you do need actual training and can't just sit there doing the blind elephant thing -- you know, like math, language, lab, even some music reading/analysis -- and that's even before getting into the fact that even if you don't sacrifice the whole Great Books idea, there are many women and POC authors they're just ignoring, like Frederick Douglass for example -- I didn't get to read his autobiography til I was in a grad school Early AmLit class, and it just knocked me out. It would fit perfectly into the Program! But they'll never add it. They do have optional classes ("preceptorials") and all-college seminars which are much, much more diverse, but they're not part of the core.