honestly if anyone ever tells you that academia is fueled by anything other than passion and bitterness they are lying. so many papers get written because someone read something shitty about a topic they love and had to set everyone straight on their bullshit
I wrote an entire research paper/presentation because the author of a book we read in that class insulted William Herschel and mocked him for thinking the moon was occupied (in the 18th century! Like he could have possibly known differently, asshole.) and never once mentioned that his discoveries doubled the known size of the solar system and that he discovered the first planet found since antiquity.
Dude was an asshole to one of my history crushes. I couldn’t let that stand.
My middle school teacher’s highly negative and over simplified trashing of Poe and his work- using censored ( bizarrely- it just made things less rotty, and descriptive, and took out all the cool vocab) and abridged highlights of his work- and failing to mention that his BIOGRAPHY WAS WRITTEN BY HIS PRACTICAL NEMESIS.
Not a perfect man, not a perfect author- but you don’t get to just lazily dismiss his importance -and the validity of horror fiction- and get away with it.
Did so much reading and research just to give a presentation telling her to back the fuck off. Why I know the Conquerer worm by heart.
Oh man I had a teacher like this in college. My regular humanities professor went on sabbatical in the middle of the semester to study abroad for a few weeks for her PhD and the sub they brought in was the worst. Not only did she just decide to toss our professor’s dictated schedule which had us study the Baroque era in order to give a bunch of super patriotic (but pretty historically inaccurate) lectures on America where like nothing of artist value is happening amongst the colonists. She ditched the Baroque to talk about Paul Revere and crap. (Oh and did we talk AT ALL about Native American art, which might have at least justified the detour? NOPE! Of course not.)
Her reasons for this were “Ugh I just hate the Baroque period.”
Well, in that class we had to split into groups and choose a time period to study and each group gave a class long lecture on the art, music, and theatre of that era, and I chose the Baroque because I LOVE it. I led the presentation. This was my first semester in college. I’d had 2 semesters of AP art history the year before, passed with flying colors, and this class was a watered down version of that so I breezed through it. I was also still in the middle of the Great Teenage Depression stage in my life, had been a full-time straight A AP student who went to community college even though I could have walked into any state university in Texas, that’s how bad my depression was. So basically I was a complete smartass with senioritis so bad it lasted into my college years.
And I fucking love Baroque art.
You bet your ass I told the sub that. Like right to her face. Pointedly said “I happen to LOVE Baroque art” and then led an impassioned lecture on it and how awesome it is. And I had plenty of Artemisia Gentileschi, who for the uninitiated, painted a series of paintings that were just Judith and Holofernes. So I made this incompetent substitute sit there and squirm while I lectured about sexism and injustice while there’s a very bloody painting of a woman sawing a man’s head off his body covering the wall across from her.
Well when our actual professor got back, she asked how the sub was. I wasted no time in telling my professor that the sub was an incompetent hack who had no business teaching us and that she threw out the lesson plans to do her own thing, but don’t worry, the entire class knows all about the Baroque thanks to me. And after class, I told the professor about the sub wanting to skip Baroque because she doesn’t like it, then I told her what I did during the presentation.
My professor looked like she wanted to high five me.
The Paradox Machine 