I'm back home from the University of South Florida St. Petersburg, where I'm running hard after a Master of Liberal Arts in Florida Studies. This term was hard, but I also goofed off a bit. In grad school, there are no Latin Honors (cum laude and all that), no honors in the major, so I have decided to study, yes, but also not to get all knotted up about it, and if I make a B, that's fine. That's all I need. But so far, I seem to be heading toward A's. That's fine, too. I certainly do not mind.
The toughest class was Theory of History. Theoretical stuff makes my head hurt, anyway, but historical theory can get really out there. The professor is a young neo-hippie (doesn't even own a car) who is uber-smart. He's very fond of the French Revolution, so we read a lot of translations of French historians. I've already talked about being a bit of an Annaliste in my own methods. I like background in my histories. We explored other theories and methods, some of them I liked, some I didn't. Post-structuralism (post-modernism) can only, in my opinion, lead to paralysis. If you believe there's no such thing as "truth," what do you do as a historian? Why bother? I think there is such a thing as "truth," though it may not always -- or ever -- be absolute. I think we can say things about the past that are true, and from which we can learn.
The seminar in Modern Florida was not that tough, but there was a lot of reading, some of it absolutely excellent. One of those was Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America, an account of a very dark incident in the history of the United States and of Florida. Dr. Arsenault, who conducted the seminar, assigned the book, and almost all of us agreed that it was the best of the books we were assigned. The author, Gilbert King, won a Pulitzer Prize just last month for the book, and it is well-deserved. I did my paper for this course on "Prohibition and the Coast Guard in St. Petersburg, 1927-1933." I'm waiting for feedback from Dr. Arsenault on that. It was fun to do, and interesting to me because Prohibition is one of my favorite periods of U.S. history, and I served in the Coast Guard. My husband also served (he's the reason I joined), and was stationed in St. Petersburg in the early 1970s. Our younger daughter was born there.
And Dr. Arsenault gives great parties!
The last class I took was in Feature Writing (as in newspapers and magazines), which I took to satisfy the writing requirement for the Florida Studies degree. I chose that course, as I figured there would be far less reading in that than in a literature course, which was another way to satisfy the requirement. I didn't need 10 books to read on top of what I had to read for Theory and Modern Florida, and I hate having books assigned and then having to dissect them looking for what I think is often not there. But I won't get into that.
The Feature Writing course was interesting, though the professor in the beginning was too enamored of the technology of the online component. The University of South Florida is switching from Blackboard (used for mounting assignments, receiving submissions of homework and papers, e-mail service to the class, and other functions) to Canvas. We used Blackboard at the University of North Florida, where I did my post-bacc work, and I thought it was a dog. I think Canvas is a pig. Paper works.
The other reason I took Feature Writing was that we actually WROTE! We had to do two major feature articles (2500 words or more). Mine won't be published -- that's not where my interest lies. But it was fascinating to do the articles. The first one was on suicide, a rather grim topic. I learned a heck of a lot, and once I get back home, plan to do some awareness work. It's just so important. The second article was on the great white shark. That was most fascinating. I chose to focus on the shark that was tagged in March off the coast of Jacksonville, FL, and the efforts of OCEARCH to tag and track great white sharks around the world.
And that was my term.
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