Feb. 5th, 2002
(no subject)
Feb. 5th, 2002 02:18 pmIt's days like this that I ask myself, "Why do I bother?"
I spent the last half hour tracking down two unrelated bugs. The reports have been filed to the "Nobody" account on the "bug-tracking" software, where they will languish until Doomsday.
It's hard to take pride in your work when the rest of the office would prefer that you suck at it.
I'd be less peeved about this if I weren't having difficulty in class as well. I mean, come on, it's Modern Drama, I ate this stuff for lunch in high school. Well, read it over lunch anyway. Stoppard, Beckett, Ionesco, I was all over those guys. So I get into class and the first paper (due a week from Thursday, pushed back from a week from today) is on Problems in Genre... "Explore major questions that changes in the genres of tragedy and comedy pose for modern drama." I find myself completely bemused by the jargon ("Explore major questions?") and unsure whether I know enough about the genres of tragedy and comedy to really write about them... I get the feeling that I'm lacking the necessary background. I really have absolutely no idea what went on in the theatre between, say, the English Civil War and about 1850 when the first of the class texts was published. Two hundred years worth of genre conventions that I know nothing about. For me, this paper is the equivalent of "Write a three to four page essay on the effects of Communism in China," to which my analogous response will be "It sucked."
Theoretically the professor is going to talk about what she actually expects out of the paper on Thursday, and it's not like I'll really have time between now and then to do much work on it.
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Okay. According to the Web, in Britain we had John Dryden (in the late 1600s) and Oliver "She Stoops to Conquer" Goldsmith (1700s), along with Richard "School for Scandal" Sheridan in the late 1700s. These names mean almost nothing to me, but they're a starting point. Go me.
I spent the last half hour tracking down two unrelated bugs. The reports have been filed to the "Nobody" account on the "bug-tracking" software, where they will languish until Doomsday.
It's hard to take pride in your work when the rest of the office would prefer that you suck at it.
I'd be less peeved about this if I weren't having difficulty in class as well. I mean, come on, it's Modern Drama, I ate this stuff for lunch in high school. Well, read it over lunch anyway. Stoppard, Beckett, Ionesco, I was all over those guys. So I get into class and the first paper (due a week from Thursday, pushed back from a week from today) is on Problems in Genre... "Explore major questions that changes in the genres of tragedy and comedy pose for modern drama." I find myself completely bemused by the jargon ("Explore major questions?") and unsure whether I know enough about the genres of tragedy and comedy to really write about them... I get the feeling that I'm lacking the necessary background. I really have absolutely no idea what went on in the theatre between, say, the English Civil War and about 1850 when the first of the class texts was published. Two hundred years worth of genre conventions that I know nothing about. For me, this paper is the equivalent of "Write a three to four page essay on the effects of Communism in China," to which my analogous response will be "It sucked."
Theoretically the professor is going to talk about what she actually expects out of the paper on Thursday, and it's not like I'll really have time between now and then to do much work on it.
---
Okay. According to the Web, in Britain we had John Dryden (in the late 1600s) and Oliver "She Stoops to Conquer" Goldsmith (1700s), along with Richard "School for Scandal" Sheridan in the late 1700s. These names mean almost nothing to me, but they're a starting point. Go me.