The Semester in Papers

Papers are my favorite part of every semester. For most people, I think it's what they most despise, but for me the papers I write are the only solid products that come out of sitting in a chair for 20 hours a week listening to someone talk. I often judge my classes on how driven and fun the papers I write for them are, and this semester is no exception.

Here then, is a review of the semester's classes, as seen through papers.

Biology 101 - I didn't write any papers for this class. That means that I was bored to tears during lecture, skipped every chance I got, and studied only enough to pass. Considering that I decided to forgo studying for the final in order to finish a paper for another class (enthusiasm sometimes does not trump procrastination), I may not have even managed that. I am really hoping that I get a passing grade for this class though, because I need it to graduate.

My Final Grade: C
The Grade I Give the Class: C

ASAN 202, South and Southeast Asia - This is a freshman overview class of two Asian regions. A lot of Asian Studies majors take it as seniors because we are too busy either doing the gen ed. reqs as freshmen or are looking for interesting classes that have something to do with our focus. I took its sister class, ASAN 201, East Asia my freshman year and waited till now to get the other half done with.

Both of these classes are lecture heavy and way too broad for me to remember a general amount for a length of time, but both have a final paper that requires only that the topic be on the regions approached in class. When Taiwan is in that region I don't have to think too much about what I'm going to do. But Taiwan is not a part of South/Southeast Asian (though a case for the latter could be made) and I had to do a lot of searching before I came up with a satisfying topic.

I ended up writing an overview of South Asian folk tales. Read 6 or so books on regional stories, and tried to make the case that they can provide a good interdisciplinary education to the regional scholar. Once I had finished and turned the paper in I realized that I wanted to redo it and divide the structure up thematically instead of geographically, but it was too late. Sure enough, that was the major critique on it when I got it back.

Overall this paper was one of the most fun to research and write about, so I give the class a thumbs up.

My Final Grade: A
The Grade I Give the Class: A

Next class is ASAN 3hundred something. Modern Asian Nations.

This class is always a mixed bag. Like I mentioned in my previous post, the students in it are not all the students that you would want in a class where the teacher tries to drive learning by discussion. I skipped quite a few times, where as with the 202 class I didn't.

However, with this class I got the chance to write about Taiwan, and in doing so managed to up my expertise in the area of my academic interest. The book I read, Taiwan and Post Communist Europe, was surprisingly interesting for a book on economic diplomacy, and is one I'd like to own if it didn't cost over a hundred dollars on Amazon. That's what university libraries are for, I suppose.

I made the mistake of reading the book at the beginning of the semester and trying to write my paper on it at the end, so that by the time I was writing I had forgotten most of the concrete points that I had intended to include. I make a habit of heavily annotating books with stickies, so the damage of time was not completely irreparable by the little slips of paper that served as memory bandages for my project, but I ended up with a very untidy product. Out of a suggested six page paper I wrote only four, but ended up with a decent grade anyway.

My Final Grade: A
The Grade I Give the Class: B

Race, Class and the Law - Ah, a well structured class with decent reading material, knowledgeable professor, and enthusiastic students. That's what college is about. The class revolved around the readings and discussion of readings. Almost no writing was involved whatsoever until the last few weeks of the semester in which we had to write a ten page paper on any law case we wanted as long as we made a token effort to refer to critical race theory.

Since the elections had just ended and California was ablaze in anti Prop 8 litigation, I wrote my paper on that. Talk about last minute. I was afraid that I had somehow missed my deadline and was going to fail the class on account of it, but when grades came in it seemed as if all was well. Of all the papers that I wrote, this one was probably the most solid, and the subject lent itself to real fun analysis.

My Final Grade: A
The Grade I Give the Class: A

My final class was Racism & Ethnicity in Hawaii. This was perhaps the exact opposite of my Race and Law class. Not much discussion, readings that I skipped completely, a teacher that was very knowledgeable, but was not in depth, and a ton of little writing assignments that meant nothing and were a pain to write. I ended up skipping one entirely, but with the way the grading was structured I ended up with an A+ for the class.

For my final paper I had to read a book on Hawaiian issues and chose Na Kua'aina. Writings on Hawaiian issues in general are supremely boring, but this book took the cake. My 'review' of it resembled a first grade book report ('chapter one was about...') but the only other option was to write a paper with a separate thesis and a insert a few choice quotes, perhaps, 'Hawaiians live off the land' and pass it off as a review. I didn't care nearly enough for the topic to go through that bother and pumped out my most fill-in-the-blanks-here BS paper of the semester. I still got an A.

My Final Grade: A
The Grade I Give the Class: C