I started today with an omlette and two cups of coffee. I had 9 combined hours of class ahead of me- something I've done before but not at SFSU- so I knew I'd need to eat hearty. Or at least, I knew that if I skipped breakfast like normal, I'd be in for one hell of a trippy crash somewhere in the middle of "art for kids".
As it was, I still had another cup of coffee after PAINTING I...
Probably because, well,
I LOVE CAFFINE.
Anyhoo, 7 hours after I started stretching my first canvas (pretty nifty stuff to know how to do, folks), I was folding red construction paper with bleary eyes and a sinking lower jaw.
I worked mostly in silence. I look forward to the future, where I'll get a chance to, eh, act out and jump around and help classmates. For now, I have to focus on working hard and making things that are interesting to me and others. There's only so many things one can do with cardboard, an exacto knife, and colored paper.
I digress. Intro: over. It's on the the meaty part.
Art Education for children ends at, oh, 4 sharp. Western Art History starts at 4:10 downstairs and only meets at the midweek. I hastily stash my unfinished work and bolt with my backpacks and makeshift art box (my canvas stretchers were too big, so I took them in my guitar case along with my canvas and other materials). I had a lot of stuff as I plodded around, looking for 193.
There seemed to be a crowd gathering. I wandered up to the door like anyone who had never been to a class in that building might have, unsure of whether or not it was the right room in spite of the bold numbering. Through the 12 or so people crowded around the entrance, I could make out 3 things:
1. There were students sitting in the aisles with syllabusses and every visible chair was occupied. 2. The projector was showing The Concert by Jan Vormeer (I couldn't read it very well from outside through dozens of people) and The Exctasy of St. Teresa. 3. The teacher was in the middle of what appeared to be lecture. I couldn't hear her words, just her pleasant monotone.
I checked my phone. 4:01pm. Goood. So this isn't my class. Wait. Is it?
"Is this the last class?" I ask some cute girl with blue hair.
"I have no idea," she says. As no one looking around in confusion jumps to answer, I am left in the dark. I set down my heavy stuff and prepare to make myself as thin as possible for when the marauding horde contained in the tiny lecture hall descends upon the parking lot and into 5pm traffic like a swarm of locusts. Others begin to sit and relax. That's when we hear it. It's pretty recognizable even on the intangible strain it was going. That call and response we all knew well at one point in our lives, and still heard a few times every year. Frikkin ROLE.
"Abby Doyle?"
"Here!"
"Gary Draper?"
"Right Here!"
Ashley Emerson?
"Here!"
The cute girl was like, "Oh SNAP." and then, TWO things happened.
1. We all started pushing into the room. 2. There remained the same amount of room in the lecture hall and all we did was create pressure.
I closed my eyes and concentrated on her consonants. she was on the Gs. We pushed harder. Something gave.
And I thought the 28 got intimate. It was like a spooning party. by the time we breached the threshhold. My name was clearly audible. I was all, "HERE, YO!"
somewhere, someone laughed.
Oh ha ha. cool. I'm being dry humped by freshmen and someone in a seat thinks it's funny. Then I stopped and thought about it, cuz it was actually pretty funny. At least I wasn't going to be dropped. Role finished with only one person not in attendance. The aisles were still STUFFED. What was the deal here? Why did we have such a small room? When the teacher moved immediately on to the add policy, I put two and two together. This room wasn't too small. This was just the Nuts class to add. It had these things going for it:
1. It was once a week, on a WED.
2. It was at 4:10, conveniantly missing the 9-12 and 1-4 classes so popular in the art dept.
3. It was an art class and a history class, and needed badly by both majors.
4. It had no prerequisites.
5. It was 3 units.
There were easily more than 100 people there, more than twice the allowed amount of people in the classroom. That meant that there were more people trying to add the class than there were even people in the class.
O.o
The teacher was naturally assulted by every self serving question known to seniors. What i mean is, "Do you give priority to seniors who need this one class to graduate?" was asked like, five times. Then it struck me. Was I really standing there with almost 40 pounds of stuff on my back while a bunch of people were chillin' in the seats who weren't even in the class? I raised my hand.
"YES?"
"How many people looking to add the class are sitting down?"
This was a fair question, as all the people I was currently spooning in the aisle, to the best of my knowlege, were in the class. A show of hands revealed that more than half of the people seated were just "sitting in". I looked at my own question and found that it made me sound like one of the hopeful adders.
I'm not sure why I was mad. I was tired and class had started without me- they had run out of syllabuses ten minutes before class started!!! And I was standing next to someone apperently unfamiliar with deodorants of any form...
The hope-full add questions continued. I tuned out. I thought of a funny cartoon with a singing shark I'd once seen.
Eventually, we got to notetaking and I grabbed a syllabus from one of the freshmen leaving the class early. I ended up being one of the last dozen or so people without a chair as people filtered out over the next several hours. Then we watched a video which, while showing some GREAT images of Michelangelo di Caravaggio's stuff, sucked serious balls. There was not enough emphasis on the artwork and it's importance, and WAY TOO MUCH MADE FOR TV ACTING by some hamm actors. to top that off, they would continually show the same stupid scenes of these 17th century cretins running up and down hallways with capes. It was absurd to think that somewhere out there, the guy who made this video about this deep and important painter decided that the best way to show how great he was was with dramatic re-enacments of the filler portions of his life.
And I'm still standing while this is going on.
ANYWAY!
the morale of the story is we need a bigger budget, and more units of priority enrollment. If as many seniors aren't going to graduate this year as it looks like because their classes were all filled up, then there may be som eserious hell to pay.
~Killer Bee
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