What Do You MEAN...
So, as previously established, I'm working on finally finishing my history degree. Right now, I'm doing some of my upper level courses and one of them is on witchcraft and heresy in Europe. One of my classmates made a Discord server and invited everyone. I joined because why not and...I want you to guess which things about the class were frustrating/confusing to my classmates.
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So, I'll start with the reasonable ones: Gnosticism is hard to understand, the professor sometimes doesn't have materials up as quickly as some people would prefer, grading takes a while and the details about the paper we're supposed to be writing have been pretty vague and open-ended. I can at least agree that I'd prefer more guidance on the paper since I genuinely have no fucking idea what he actually expects from us.
How about the complaints that prompted me to write this blog entry?
- Why is there so much reading? Why are we expected to read so much?!
- There is a lot of work for this class broadly, which apparently just does not make sense to some people
- Why did we move on from the Witch Trials? I expected more Witch Trials? Alas, time moves on ever forward and I'm sorry that this is how you're finding out that several hundred years of history happened between now and the Witch Craze.
- Didn't learn any spells. Witchcraft/heresy history class should be about spells and being Wiccan, I suppose.
- Why would a professor even bring up media at all? Why did the professor mention the Matrix, this isn't a film class. This isn't a beach, it's a bathtub, etc.
Like. I cannot stress this enough. This is an upper level history/religion course. Why wouldn't we be reading a lot and doing a lot of work? Why would a history class not explicitly about the Witch Trials not spend the entire fucking class talking about just the Witch Trials? Why isn't this history class teaching us how to cast spells? I don't want to be mean, but I think they might actually be stupid?
Naturally, some people picked Midsommar as their choice in media (I'm not going to explain the assignment, it doesn't matter) and like. They all kind of missed the point and had bad takes about the things they did take away from it. I can't do this, man.