Friday, September 21, 2012

Anthropology Dreaming

I had a dream just before I woke up this morning, not quite a nightmare, but weird.

I was taking the final for a cultural anthropology course, and I wasn't feeling well prepared.  But nonetheless, I was taking the final.

The final was spread around, so you took part in an anthro lab, part in a museum annex, and so on.

And it was all cultural artifacts, and you were supposed to write your answer, but you had to find the question that went with the artifact, which wasn't entirely clear, and then you had to figure out where you were supposed to write your answer, which meant that at one point, I was trying to scratch my answer onto a sort of teddy bear furry surface with a knife and wondering how anyone was possibly going to read it or figure out that it was my answer even.

Then I went to the museum annex, and I was hopeful, because I thought I'd have some clue in there (I hadn't had much clue about the lab things and the teddy bear), but it was more of the same.  And I was frustrated.

And I woke up, and what upset me was that despite my frustration, I had been taking this exam which was more about finding the questions and figuring out where and how to answer than about knowing or writing anything about cultural anthropology, and still I didn't stop and question the professor or the point.  I just went along like a sheep with the whole thing.  Baaaaaa.


I'd like to note that I took several anthropology (cultural and physical) classes in college, and they were pretty much great and interesting, and the professors never gave anything but straight-forward, reasonable exams.

2 comments:

  1. Love it.

    I never have flashback dreams of school, oddly enough. I'm actually more surprised that I haven't had any stress nightmares about the classes I now teach.

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  2. I did have one anthropology class like that -- I mean, not with the teddy bear and the knife; but with the exam being with museum artifacts and bones and us having to figure out (from the display the professor set up) what he wanted to know.

    The "questions" were all the same -- tell me everything you can about this site. (We were supposed to assume we'd found the display out in the field somewhere.)

    It was kind of cool, in retrospect, but occasionally maddening at the time. I'm still annoyed at him slipping in gorilla bones when we had only been studying human anatomy. I got EVERYTHING from that site wrong.

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