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Ever since my childhood, my mother has fed me more with novels than food (well, that does answer for my immensely huge appetite for books and hardly any for food!). And it was right then that the thought of taking up English in my undergraduate degree seeped into my head.
I did go on to take English for my UG and am still sailing the same boat, alive, fortunately. The relationship between me and my course has been a whole roller-coaster one, with the lows amplified by my over-qualified professors.
How It All Began
The first day of my first semester began at sharp 8.44 a.m., with the same professor ranting her ocean of knowledge for the next consecutive two hours. We were mere kids, and most of us had dragged ourselves through the 12th CBSE boards and landed with hefty incomprehensible Literature Classics on our very first day.
The complexity of the texts grew, but so did our horizons. The course became interesting nevertheless and hard work paid off, many times at least. Things began to make sense bit by bit over time and we began to believe that we would definitely sail through the tough journey.
But as time passed, a huge question mark started hovering over this optimistic belief of ours.
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A Normal day In An English Honours Class
Almost all the professors teaching us are lavishly qualified – some Cambridge graduates, some going to pursue their further education from Oxford and what not! The amount of knowledge they possess and their proficiency at what they are teaching is mind-boggling at times.
Don’t be surprised if I tell you that a few of them have the entire bio-data of literary figures, right from their childhood mischiefs to their relationship scandals to their career struggles to the way in which they died all memorised!
So at times, one feels pretty much like a pitcher who is being filled and filled with insurmountable loads of gyaan. They would bombard you with terms and theories which make no sense no matter how many times you go through them and then expect you to know them.
The saturation point comes halfway down your degree and you realise that either you are a thick-headed idiot with hardly any knowledge about anything, or your professors are way too intellectual for you to digest.
I really wonder why the course has to be so exclusionary at times and why do professors have to be like – “Holy Goodness! You haven’t even done this?!”
Not everybody is highly read in the books that we deal with, and it is totally OKAY, as long as one has the will to learn the same.
Can’t our professors take a chill pill and know that not all the students are on the same plane, not every student will be the Sharma Ji Ka Beta or Beti and be A-Z well-versed with the course, and it is absolutely alright, because, at the end of the day, each of us wants to pass the course and are willing enough to put in all the required efforts.
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