Mana reqsisqani
The quarter is starting to get to its feet over here. I’ve had all my classes save one, my neurolinguistics seminar, which I’m rather looking forward to tomorrow. Monday was a bit more harried than I anticipated, as the professor I’m TAing for wanted us to hold section. This is rather unorthodox for the first week, let alone the first day! On the bright side, he also is in the habit of preparing exercises in advance, so there was not much work to be done in that short preparation period. Section is required for this class, and as such it was completely packed this week – not a single spare seat in the house. Teaching in cramped conditions is a little difficult because the room gets hot, and the kids are a little less apt to volunteer in a large class. Last quarter I averaged something like 10-15 students in my non-required sections, and yesterday I had about 30. It’s slightly ridiculous, and I think slightly unnecessary to have required section attendance, but on the other hand, this class is also going to be a fair bit more difficult. Other than a bunch of TA stuff, I only have Quechua on Mondays, so it works out nicely to have several low-stress hours of class attendance and then just one hour of teaching. Very nice indeed.
Today all I had was Phonetics, which I fear is going to be equal parts trying and inspiring. It’s taught by the professor I TAed for last quarter, who is the most laissez-faire professor I’ve seen. We have no syllabus, no book, no readings, no homework, and no real expectations for our term paper. This is nice, but it also means he teaches the class with the expectation that none of us are really learning anything, or even want to be there. He told us this morning that he expected us to attend class “at least 51% of the time”, which I know is a joke, but sets an odd tone for a graduate seminar. Graduate students don’t skip class – we’re putting a lot of our lives into being here, and we tend to be rigorous and reliable students. We wouldn’t have been admitted if we weren’t! For all that, it’s still going to be an interesting class. We’re doing acoustic phonetics exclusively, and it’s a subject that’s one of my secret loves. I feel some days like I could have been a phoneticist in another life, if acoustic phonetics had been taken seriously by our Generative-minded undergraduate department. As it’s not really part of the Generative research paradigm, it wasn’t actually taught at USC. What little of it I’ve done (which is more than most, admittedly) was from my very favorite professor, an adjunct who USC didn’t hire and who was teaching Intro Phonology, though he was in fact a phonetician. I got a big kick out of reading spectrograms, and he inspired me to be a linguist.
Sometimes I look back at those days and I see what it was that got me inspired about linguistics and linguistic research. If I hadn’t continued to bark up the phonology tree (though each class after his was somewhat of a disappointment), I certainly could have ended up as a phoneticist. There’s a lot of room for phonetics in phonology, actually, particularly in the cognitive science approaches. I think all three of these things converge in some way, if for no other reason than both being concerned with scientifically describable data with direct language interface. In other words, both cognitive science and phonetics are among the very few contact points of hard science (biology, physics) and language. Typology fits into this picture too, if you think of it as an offshoot of applied statistics interfacing with evolution, biology, migration, what have you. Typology is an interesting grab-bag of domains, which I think takes a particularly large mind to grasp and is probably why Lewis is well suited to it. It’s like majoring in world history. The world is a large place, with lots of history, affected by an inconceivable number of factors, and those who can synthesize that knowledge are laudable.
My brain feels flushed with thoughts of career. And today, I’m feeling determined to be a straight-backed eyes-forward engaged-in-my-life sort of individual. This happens to me less than it ought, but if there’s anything less useful than being a defeatist by nature, it’s feeling defeated about being a defeatist. I’m not getting much work done today, but I’m determined not to let it get the better of me. I’ve been to class, finished my Quechua homework, emailed all my potential referees for the internal fellowship application whose deadline is coming up, and I even found time to blog. I’m prepared for tomorrow, and I’m not going to feel swamped or behind on anything though I am, at turns, both. Today, I do what I can, and revel in the very success of doing.