Rag Week

This doesn't mean what people might initially think...it's a week to be drunk 24 hours a day. I guess up until last year it was actually advertised by the school and they had lunch specials and drink deals at the Student Union bar. But maybe they realised that people who are locked out of their minds aren't going to go to class and the teachers will be lecturing to 10% of their students. So, probably not the thing for a school to advocate right? Student body elections are next week and a lot of them are talking about bringing it back. I don't see why. It's not like it matters if the school is in on it or not. The school isn't going to try to stop it--there are people having whiskey brunch in the walkways and vodka picnics on the grass in front of the apartments. I don't really care if they want to get hammered at noon, I just don't see why they need the excuse.

I kind of like tutorials. I don't think I'm supposed to, but they are kind of more what I'm used to--format-wise. There are fewer students and one teacher who knows your name and can call you out so you have to pay attention at least a little bit. We had to read an article about this journalist who went undercover as a low-wage worker in Key West in 1998. I enjoyed reading it. She wrote it like a story instead of some academic journal entry. Anyways, as you can imagine it was a sucky experience for her and she told all about it. There's an older man in my tutorial and he seems nice and well-meaning and all, but the thing about old men who seem nice and well-meaning is that sometimes when they think they are being clever they are actually being ignorant. His witty question for the group was "Do you think it's about time the United States have another civil war?" His idea was that the civil war was fought over slavery (which it wasn't) and that if we just have a war that pins the rich against those below the poverty line it would abolish...slavery? poverty itself? No man. I'm kind of the token American in this tutorial now and I expected to have to put in my two cents, but not immediately following that. I don't know where the feeling came from, but I felt the need to put the Civil war record straight so I started with "The Civil war wasn't really about slavery" and they all looked kind of surprised. Is that rude? I didn't say it rudely--I said it kind of quickly and just throwing it out there. I don't want to be rude...sorry old man if I was rude. Ugh now I feel bad. I went on to say that even if there was a full-on war between the classes it wouldn't work. That low-wage workers are low-wage workers because they are "unskilled workers" and employers are taking advantage of the fact that they are unskilled which points to a lack of education on the worker's part so working on the education system would be much more helpful. Blah blah blah. It was thought provoking.

I have to write an essay by the end of the month for Sociology and one for Traditional Irish music sometime...he hasn't even posted the essay titles yet though so I'm not going to worry about it yet. That one is going to be harder because we have to find our own sources I think. The Soc essay has a note that if you use a book other than the list of ones she gave us at the beginning of the term it will only looked upon favorably if we use it really well. So basically that's saying that we don't have to really do research in the sense that we have to go out and find our own sources, we just have to either look through those books on the list (doubtful) or just look at the lecturer's powerpoint, find something you like, and look at the bibliography at the end to see where she got it. Kind of ridiculous.

This may sound stupid, but I kind of miss having daily assignments. Maybe I just miss having a sense of structure.

I think I'm going to call it in early tonight.