While Berkeley is far more like Brown than MIT could ever dream to be, one thing drives me batty: there is way too much of the Northern California process, self analysis shit in the classroom. I just sat through 2 one-hour classes where over half of each class was devoted to process, analysis of the professors (section) or self-analysis by the professors (lecture). We’re no longer in the first week of school so i have *no* patience for this.
I’m also having a really really hard time dealing with the slowness of speech of most professors. Out of all of my professors, one of them is a New Yorker/total East Coaster. He talks as fast i do, makes no apologies for it and demands that you keep up just by his assertive manner of speaking. It’s odd how refreshing this is for me. (And added bonus is that while he can do the whole post-structuralist speak, he keeps it to a minimum instead of trying to validate his existence through incomprehensible combinations of discourse words.)
As most of my SF friends are actually natives of the East Coast, i forget how much the slow-paced, process-centric Californian tendencies drive me up the wall. I just want to plow through the material. If i don’t get something in the first round, i’d rather repeat it than think that a slow version will allow for better comprehension. That never works for me and by going slow, my mind wanders.
I think i need more sleep.
Welcome to the west coast!
I have only been to California a couple of times.
I think I know what you are talking about though.
There was this episode on the TV series “Angel”, I think during the first season. Demons took over the city government. They rendered the police completely ineffective by making them buy into all this new age psycho babble.
And man, they used a lot of it. It was very very very freaking process oriented mental paradigm. Completely nuts!!
Anyway, good news is – he recovered.
With luck, maybe so will the rest of California.
Good process just means that you are focus on the infrustrucutre of communication as much as the content. I assume it could even be modeled in social network terms.
Clear communication and procedural strucutres that prevent domination and allow for collaberative decision-making sounds great to me. But, hell, I’m a Cascadian.
That is interesting! the other week there was an article on cnn, that a uk institute analyzed (please correct me on the pointer!), that repeating something twice is more comprehensible than slo one timer – just like how you described yourself!
at least you didn’t go to mills where instead of self-analysis shit it was men suck and it was men suck for four years (if only they really did 😉
Does anybody have the pointer to that study? It sounds interesting! I Googled a bit to see if I could find any real explanations for why people feel compelled to talk so slowly in formal settings, but all I could find was lots of advice-givers saying you should talk slowly as part of public speaking. I think it’s one thing if you’re going for dramatic effect or need to stop and think about what you’re saying, but it seems like (within reason) a bad way to convey information otherwise. If I had a dollar for every class I’ve fallen asleep in, I could retire.