Seminar Blues

I have been relatively fortunate during the pandemic. I have not had to regularly use Zoom or anything like it for work or school. Earlier this year I did have to do a large conference call, but I mostly just played guitar off-screen. Today I had my first real Zoom conference experience. Our major has a bi-annual seminar where we present our recent work. I'm planning on defending my dissertation this semester, so I ended up presenting about it today.

The thing is, I hate seminars. Maybe I just hate the way we do seminars in Korea...but I think it is more a general disdain for the format. I finished all my coursework years ago, so I haven't had to endure seminars for quite a while. But it is the de facto format for academic conferences, at least here in Korea, so I am doomed, I guess.

Zoom seems to make everything I hate about seminars worse. It feels even more formal and awkward than it would in-person. In all fairness, though, one plus is being able to turn off my camera to lay down on the floor for a minute, or sip some beer.

On top of all this, I am kind of terrible at presentations. Well, that's not true. I am actually pretty good at it, especially if I get to use my native tongue, but when it comes to presenting my own original ideas in Korean, I go all over the place. I remember giving presentations about course materials in classes years ago, and I don't remember having this problem. In that situation everything is definite and clear. You are basically reporting on something everyone else presumably read.

I think what is hard for me about presenting about my own ideas in Korean is that I don't know how "far out" I need to go, and end up getting snowblind as I try to overexplain everything. The connections and tagents I go off on are organic and important, depending on who your audience is, but they are also distracting. This isn't a problem, however, in an ordinary discussion. When you are engaged in an actual dialog with people, you get feedback which gives you a sense about what you need to touch on and how much you need to explain...and how. But when the "discussion" is really just this awkwardly formal question-answer turn-taking phase of a presentation, you don't really get feedback like you would if you were actually having a conversation.

This is also just how school is here, unfortunately. Class discussion is usually very stifled and awkward. The exception in my experience here was one professor whose classes I took every semester. Instead of a seminar he would do a colloquium, where every week we would take turns briefly summarizing last week's discussion then briefly introducting a new question to continue it. And by brief I mean brief. He always made a point to explain that it should take just a few minutes, yet, out of force of habit, people would sometimes come in with these lengthy presentations prepared. I remember during my first semester one guy brought in 20+ A4 pages and the professor just told him to summarize it in 5 minutes.

Anyway, what I loved about the colloquium, in contrast to seminars, is that it makes fucking sense. Especially if it's a small group that meets on a weekly basis. That class itself is 90% open-ended discussion. You read some material on the topic (there isn't necessarily any assigned reading), you develop your own questions and ideas about it, maybe follow those leads into other topics, then you come to class and discuss it. You end up doing actual research rather than just "doing" the assigned reading. What is especially nice is that the actual interests, concerns, and questions people bring to the table become the course content. This is six-hundred times better than assigning reading, then re-reading or summarizing or presenting about the same material everyone supposedly read.

I'm so ready to be done with school, in case you couldn't tell. Seminars like these always discourage me. I would love to graduate and work even just as a lecturer, making a modest living talking with people everyday about interesting stuff. I think I have a knack for it, and that I would do really well in that occupation. But school also has a funny way of making you feel like you're a madman. Learning changes your world, it changes THE world, but a seminar will always be a god damned seminar. You know?

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