Ugly.

In all my renewed enchantment with the humanities I've neglected to remember its flip side: subjectivity. I don't often encounter conflict with this principle, as I'm generally not intrusive (or memorable?) enough in class to actually get on anyone's bad side. But right now I feel unjustly victimized.

The professor is new--this is only his second semester, and I've heard other professors poke fun at him because he tries so hard to "prove himself." Ironically, he's the guy I pegged as a "pedantic jerk" on the first day of the semester. For a 200-level class, his syllabus is schizophrenic and unnecessarily complex: three 3500-word (11-page) essays, three 850-word interim response papers, three separate midterm exams, and a comprehensive final, as well as random reading quizzes. Quite honestly, I loathe the class. And you know me--I place a very high value on all knowledge and am more than willing to work hard in school. But this guy's lectures are useless. He has no mastery of language (yes, he's a native English speaker) and mixes metaphors, spits out fragments, employs incomplete analogies, and can't pick a method of presentation to save his life. It's history; present thematically or chronologically, but don't skip around throwing out random years, correcting yourself as you go, tripping over things you've said in the past and now have to own up to, pretending you're never wrong, and apologizing because this period's not your area of expertise (oh, we know).

To acknowledge my side in this dispute, my attitude is probably passive-aggressively obvious. But not everyone can like every class, and I've tried to be nice--really. I've gone to his office on two separate occasions to talk about essay grades, which seem to be arbitrarily assigned. You get no feedback or commentary on the strengths or failings of any of your writing--just a series of circled numbers. Of course, when you don't do as well as you had hoped and there is nothing to indicate what you did incorrectly, you go and talk to the professor to find out what went wrong so you don't make the same mistakes again. The first time he reacted civilly, but the second time (this morning) he was entirely rude. He wouldn't speak to me for more than five minutes, and before I could get a word in I felt like he had already created some negative image of me and my "motives" (whatever those may be) that nothing I could do or say could change. I have a sneaking suspicion he's holding my totally-subjective "class participation" points hostage in order to inflict maximum damage come grade assigning time. All I can do right now is be the best student I can be so he has no reason to hurt me, but I wouldn't put it past him. And I'm not looking forward to having two more writing assignments scored before the semester's end, as I think he's now biased against me and is going to be extra critical in an attempt to reflect his distaste in my grades (which will continue to be assigned with no justification, which will cause me to once again come into his office to see what I did wrong, which will cause me to feel misconstrued and victimized another time).