During the TA Training Day of Doom, I got to spend an hour or so learning that Engineers and Scientists think differently than Historians and Artists. Not how they think differently, mind you. Just that there are differences. I will never get that hour of my life back, nor will I get back the hour I spent listening to April O'Neil talk about ponies back in the 7th grade.
Okay, I made that last part up. You can tell because April O'Neil is the reporter from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
So, yeah, AngryMark (the English student) and I tend to think differently, while SpikyHairWill (the Biomedical Engineer) and I are frighteningly like-minded. This is no surprise. It does, however, provide an opportunity for musing about otherwise boring television shows.
The best two shows to demonstrate my point are Top Chef and America's Next Top Model. I don't love either, nor do I hate them. Top Model, however, has proven to be more likely to set me on edge.
Every time Tyra Banks or one of her Merry Men (think about it) provide feedback to the models, my blood pressure goes up a few millimeters of mercury... or Pascals, if you're feeling particularly Euro (we will also accept psi and bars). "Let your soul bubble through your smile". "Your pose needs more attitude". "Your eyes could look a little more sparkly".
How the hell are these models supposed to implement this advice? How do you you make your eyes more sparkly, short of putting glitter on the cornea? These poor girls. I can't imagine making any sense of the criticism on my best day, and these chicks haven't eaten in a decade. You know what makes my soul bubbly? Sandwiches.
Now let's look at Top Chef. The feedback to the chefs is similar on the surface to that of Top Model - the chicken was too tough, the soup was too cold, the pasta needed more butter. You know what all this feedback has in common? IT MAKES SENSE. Chicken that is too tough needs to be cooked for less time. Soup that is too cold needs to have a heat source applied to it. To add more butter to pasta, a chef must add butter.
In other words, Top Chef's feedback is quantitative. More material. Less time. These are measurable, palpable quantities. Even when the language is qualitative, like tough, it can be deconstructed into a quantifiable change.
On the other hand, Top Model is completely qualitative. The things they say are so arbitrary, so subjective, that one has to turn their brain entirely off just to watch an episode. It's so infuriating... if it wasn't a show about beautiful, scantily-clad women, I'd never watch it at all.
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4 comments:
How is a comment like, "each sentence must have a subject and a verb" subjective?
Where is the wiggle room in, "your essay is purely summary and makes no attempt to spell out a thesis?"
Ultimately, my business, at least as I practice it, is almost entirely quantitative. I think it's a real myth that because humanists tend to engage with objects of analysis that don't lend themselves to quantitative analysis somehow what we do is subjective.
There are right and wrong answers in the humanities.
i think you may have read too much into this...
huh, so when i write, "your thesis is utter crap" on a student's paper i'm being too subjective?
maybe that's what i'm doing wrong. . .
i know! i am told to be more "vanderkittenlike" when posing in my panties for no less than $500/hr (which is the going rate for models who masquerade as students these days). and i'm all "whaaaa? i thought i WAS a vanderkitten?" whatever...jerks.
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