Lectures

Last Thursday Margaret, Hannah and I went to a lecture by Deborah Tennen. Sadly, she said she had considered going to Bard, but when her parents brought her to visit, the first person they saw was some guy walking around with a bottle of wine, and her parents were like, no no no no no. Oh Bard. -.o;
This was the first time she had been here since that fateful day.
Her lecture was frustratingly SO much better than the symposium lectures that all freshman have to go to. It makes sense, I suppose, for her to be a good speaker; she was talking about linguistics and communication. However, why do all our other speakers suck? Also, I totally found out about the lecture only because my calc professor helped organize it (granted, there were bright yellow posters up, but there are so many posters up...and lots of them inform of things that are of little interest). I was so energized by the end of the lecture, because it was so good. The topic was interesting, and she was also able to well balance factual information with antidotes. It was interesting that, while her research was clearly directly related to psychology, she is not at all a psychologist, and made really no claims to analyze the 'why' behind the 'what'.

The last symposium lecture we had to go to was done by some renown Dante person who works at Columbia, but she was so unprepared and disorganized, and not a good speaker and gah. She had a good idea behind what she was saying, but it took a while for her to squeeze it out in some comprehensible manner, and, since she was reading an essay she had already written, she sometimes had to stop and translate what she had just read into language that was actually aimed at our (1st year of college) audience, and also she kept saying things in Latin, most of us don't know any Latin...

I'm going to keep looking out for optional lectures. I know there is also a series of Science ones, (this is part of a Women in Science lecture series)