Academic purgatory

I feel quite lucky this week as my Sustainable Cities class isn't meeting for two weeks due to the impending Labor Day holiday.

Therefore giving me a luxurious amount of time to focus on

I also felt a lot better knowing that a lot of my classmates are freaking out over our first graded assignment for our Planning History and Urban Form class entitled "Considering Urban Form.". Our professor is great and really knows his stuff. However, he is less specific in the syllabus for the assignment.

We are supposed to go to a place and analyze why it "somehow symbolizes urban planning." Then we need to find a way to represent it visually. He doesn't give us restrictions in terms of media and in fact, discourages us from "overthinking."

He says that "the place you pick is important." It needs to be "clear, concise, and analytical. Third, it will be easy to lose the third attribute in the last sentence. How is your product both descriptive of the place and analytically of its importance? This will be the difference between the excellent and the good project."

He is self-aware enough to slyly remark, "So, is the assignment vague enough for you? I hope so. The idea here is that you figure out what you think it should look like. Don't try to figure out what I would like, because that is impossible since I don't know."

I think that that last sentence is the final nail in a lot of our coffins. We, luckily, were not as brainwashed as some of the overachievers and members of the meritocracy as David Brooks calls them, that came after us- slavishly chasing: 1600 SAT scores, valedictorian, president of the student council positions, while being the starting QB and first chair oboe player all at the same time, etc., But I do know that the majority of my peers and I were academically brainwashed to parrot what our teachers wanted to hear, despite their insistence on "critical thinking," which to this day I still don't know what they meant.

Ironically, I went to art school, so I should be pretty confident in terms of visual representation, but there is that old high school self-loathing/self-doubt/perfectionism that constantly worries is this good enough?!?!?!?! When 20% of your grade is riding on this, one wants to be more than a little secure!

I am fairly confident in my concept- sorry I can't disclose it til next week just in case one of my peers is feeling academically lazy, which I highly doubt they will, but in this age of intellectual copyright one can never be too careful.

We won't be presenting these unless he likes the idea that is represented and feels that it warrants class discussion, so it really has to speak for itself. I think that my idea has legs on which it can stand and I have a brand-new printer so that should help.

Ugh. I can stand everything but limbo. Here goes nothing!