Re: Drought! My ideas are all dried up...


"Zeborah" <zeborah@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1hjuf9w.1ord6f5zptg2bN%zeborah@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Patricia C. Wrede <pwrede6492@xxxxxxx> wrote:

[Pamela Dean's _Tam Lin_]
Fascinating. Blackstock is closely modeled on the college Pamela and I
attended (which, in American parlance, is not the same thing as a
university), so I'm very curious about which aspects struck you as alien
and
hard to understand?

I could understand it, but it was still alien. For one thing, in New
Zealand there are no required courses apart from the fact that if you
want to get a B.A. in French then at some stage you're going to have to
study French. Required courses are what *high school* is for, and even
then the only thing required in the penultimate year is English, P.E.,
and a couple of random things according to the school like "How to write
a CV" and "Relaxation techniques" (best class ever; not on the national
syllabus, mind); and not even English in the last year. (For the last
two years I got out of P.E. by a) arranging my singing lessons to sit in
the middle of it, or b) being in the middle of going to university for a
French lecture.)

A lot of liberal arts colleges in the U.S. have what are called
"distribution requirements." The idea is that if you're going to a liberal
arts college, rather than an engineering college, you're supposed to get a
well-rounded education, and that means you have to have some science even if
you're an English major, and some of the art stuff even if you're a Biology
major, and probably some random P.E. And practically everyplace has had a
required Freshman Composition course to make sure the freshmen know basic
essay-writing stuff. At our college, the distribution requirements took the
form of dividing all the classes up into four areas -- IIRC, one was for
math and the hard sciences, one was English and history, one was art, music,
theater, etc., and one was for soft sciences like psychology and sociology
and political science and economics. You had to take a certain number of
credits in each area before they'd give you your diploma -- I think it was
six to twelve in most cases. Since most classes were six credits for a
term, it works out to two courses per area, and you could cross one area off
right away, because the courses for your major counted and you were going to
take a lot more than two of them. So it wasn't exactly an onerous or
unreasonable requirement.

Oh, and the whole lunch thing. We don't have cafeterias, we have cafes,
I think mostly owned by the Student's Association. Filled rolls, meat
pies, pasta, chips, fruit, muffins, whatever; there's no menu for the
day, and you pay with actual money, like in the real world.

They do that *now*, but this was 1970, remember. What the housing cost
covered was "room and board," not just "room." And it wasn't much like a
high school cafeteria; it was a lot more like the office cafeterias at my
day jobs, except you didn't have to ring up a total at the end because you'd
paid in advance as part of the housing fee. There were choices; it's not
like they handed you a plate and said "Eat this."

The other mildly alien thing for me, though it wouldn't have been for
everyone in NZ, was the whole living-at-university thing. We have
university halls here, but I just lived at home and bussed across town;
far cheaper.

Some people do that in the U.S., too, but the majority just don't live close
enough to their school-of-choice to commute. And the dorms are *vastly*
cheaper than apartment rental. Also, I know one or two people who did it
your way, and they all regret it, because *all* they got out of their
college years were the classes. A lot of the real education goes on after
hours, and it's difficult to hook into that if you aren't living on campus.
I commuted during grad school, and it was a very different, less intense,
and much more detached experience than my undergraduate years. And not
really any cheaper, just less of a nuisance because of not having to move at
the end of a set time period.

Patricia C. Wrede


.

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