In Pursuit of Mysteries

Hardest Working Professor in Showbiz

My Literature professor advertises himself as the “hardest working professor in showbiz” in his short bio that he sent to us. I am forced to disagree with that assessment now. My World Religion professor must take that title. My religion prof requires that we physically send him copies of our papers for grading. He sends a copy back with his markup, which is usually quite interesting. I assume he does this, based partially on what he told me, because he isn’t super computer friendly (being near retirement age) and because he hates reading papers on the screen (which I sympathize with).

He sent us a note with our returned first paper that our second paper, due by this last Friday, the 24th, had to be sent to him at his daughter’s house. Something about a wedding. I mailed my paper via two day priority mail from the post office on Tuesday, the 21st. He probably got it on Thursday in California. I received this paper back, fully graded, yesterday, the 27th.

How’s that for turn around?

(I got an ‘A’ as well but it was, after all, a paper relating to Buddhism and Hinduism so I would be saddened if I did not…)

I am a bit annoyed about my program though. I received the academic calendar for the next academic year when I got my registration materials for the current term. I just registered for Fall but I was only able to register for one course at this time (the Para-Rational Perspective) because there are no Philosophy courses offered this Fall. None. Nada. Zip. The Para-Rational Perspective is an Interdisciplinary course, as is my World Religions course. I can’t technically take any more of those and maintain my Philosophy concentration if I want to not waste credits. There are specific requirements on how many Introductory graduate course we need to take depending on track (which I am finishing this term with Literature), how many Interdisciplinary courses or courses from other disciplines we can take, and how many we are required to take in our core concentration. I need to take Philosophy courses but they don’t do any Fall term.

Asking around, this apparently is standard and they are teaching courses on the same schedule every year now. My only option is to apply for an Independent Study (even though the dead is over a month past) and to basically do this I.S. as a one man version of one of the standard philosophy courses. If I do that, it will probably get approved since finding a prof who normally teaches one of those courses shouldn’t be hard. This pisses me off because they also limit the number of Independent Studies you do and they like you to do one that leads into your thesis work. I was planning to do one relating to Antoine Faivre and Wouter Hanegraaf’s work on Esotericism. I may not get that option now.