Shot Down

Yesterday I made it through my first Wednesday of classes. My class schedule for Wednesdays this quarter is hell. I start at 8:30 AM and go straight through until 6:30 PM with a half-hour break at 5 PM. It's tiring. But, fortunately it only happens once a week, will only happen seven more times, thanks to the eight-week quarter, and is followed by a blissfully easy Thursday with only one class at 10:30.

Why am I divulging my schedule? I have no idea. But now all my stalkers know where to find me. My point is, I had a bunch of first day of classes yesterday, one of which I was most excited about as it's pretty much a main reason why I'm at this school, and why I'm in grad school in the first place. Entertainment Education. I've got the entertainment part, now I'm here to see about the education part. The class could potentially be great. Our main assignment is to write a 13-episode treatment for a serial drama (or comedy) targeting a specific audience about a specific health issue (suggestions appreciated). Well, that's what I want to do for my career! Perfect. I can be creative and do what I want! The problem is, the professor has very clear ideas about what she wants and I'm afraid our ideas are going to clash. Why do I think that? Because they already have.

While describing the final project, about how we have to find the emotion of the story, the professor subtly slipped in that we couldn't use cartoons or puppets for our script. Fine. But I wanted to know why. So I raised my hand and asked. The response I got was something along the lines of "Because you cannot evoke the same emotion with cartoons or puppets as you can with real people." "I disagree," I responded, "and you can do a lot more with cartoons and puppets than you can with real people." "Maybe so, but they are intellectually and emotionally inferior to real people" (or something like that). "Okay. I still disagree." (dude, they're made by real people). "Fine, we can discuss this later at length if you want." Um, no thanks because I have 10 freaking hours of class today and you already pissed me off. But, hello! If cartoons can't evoke emotion, why did I cry at Wall-E?

The worst part was that this interaction came immediately after her diatribe about how children need to be free to learn, how our education system tells kids what they have to know and when and how to think and how we need to cultivate free thinkers. And then she shot down my opinion.

I also made the mistake of mentioning that I was a TV writer when she asked if anyone had ever written a script or a 13 episode treatment ("Someday Maybe" and "Zelda"! I've the first seasons plotted out! Well, sort of. Anyone? Anyone?). After I said I was a TV writer, she said that in that case she and the rest of the class should grade and judge me harder. She said it as a joke, I think. Although I'm not so sure she meant it as one.

There are a bunch of other reasons why I'm skeptical about this class. For one, it seems disorganized. They ordered the wrong books at the book store and two of the three books we need to buy are-- surprise, surprise-- written by the professor. Okay, maybe she's the expert. But I'm not yet convinced. Nor am I impressed by the 800 different places she's lived and traveled to in Africa, by her ambassador husband, by the 50 children's books she's written, by the fact that she has a British accent and not her native Australian one because she was once upon a time a news broadcaster-- all of which she made sure to tell us about on the first day. Eh. I chose Hopkins because the professors seemed brilliant, but humble. Oh well. I just hope she likes AIDS jokes.