I'm exercizing the right not to think

Yesterday I suffered through the most frustrating lecture I've had in a long time - Actually, that's not true, I've sat through a lot of frustrating lectures lately, as my statistics professor isn't what you would call "super efficient" or "able to put two sentences together without trailing off on some mildly amusing yet irrelevant and ultimately confusing tangent" for that matter, but this one was frustrating for a completely different reason. The subject was hermeneutics, and the teacher was this young (for a university teacher anyway), clever man who apparently was all about making students "think". Ha! Like I go to school to do that!

He started by writing the word "OBSERVE!" in large print on the blackboard, then proceeded to slowly and deliberately sort through his notes while the class presumably pondered what great meaning could lay behind this move. "So", he finally said with a knowing smile. "What does this mean?" The following long and painful draging-uneducated-answers-out-of-eager-to-please-students session was followed by another open question: "How is thinking done?" And another: "What does 'understanding' mean?"

I spent most of the lecture not pondering how cognitive processes happen but rather why I get so insanely annoyed with this method of teaching. First off, I should explain that the questions he posed weren't the open philosophical conversation starters they might sound like - in the field of social psychology, there is actually a gigantic amount of research on exactly how people think, what observation is etc etc - and there are definitely right and wrong answers. Basically it was as if he was asking high school kids: "So, do you think there is some special pattern to how Homer writes?"

It's probably 90% my inner control freak talking, but it frustrates me to no end when people ask difficult questions they already know the answers to. What is the point? I mean, apart from seeming really clever? I felt like I was transported to one of those college movies where the young super hip (possibly plagiarized right out of Dead Poets Society) professor really challenges his students, and makes them think like they have never thought before. Not that it's the first time this has occured to me, but if I was in one of those movies, I so would have been the total square who runs to the headmaster at first chance to rat mr Super Cool out. No wonder I had such a riveting social life in high school...

School update

So, we finally figured out what the big paper will be about: Lindsay Lohan. Ok, so not really.

I'm taking social psychology (that would be micro sociology, not group psychology - there's a world of difference) and there's this paper due in january that should be about... uhm, 25 pages or something. I had gotten the impression that there were a bunch of limitations on it, but in the end there were only two: We have to pick a scientific method from a short list, and the whole group (three people) have to agree on the subject. So. We're doing a discourse analysis (incredibly clever and post structuralist) on how teenagers are portrayed in the Tina Fey/Lindsay Lohan comedy Mean Girls plus in Queen Bees and Wannabes (the parenting guide book it was based on). The idea is basically to make a little chart of all the assumptions popular psychology makes about teenagers, and hopefully come up with som dastardly clever theory about it. In OTHER words: I get to watch DVDs all winter for school - admittedly the same DVD over and over again, but who's counting, right?

Anyway, I'll convince the others in the group to write the abstract in english so I can post it here. I'm sure it'll be fascinating stuff...