A Grim Beginning

I haven’t posted any of my personal essays yet.  Four of them were too personal.   I’m going to post my favorite one, though, very soon.  It’s called “Creating a Steampunk Garden,” and I actually created one, which was exciting on several levels.

Meanwhile, the last week of Professor K’s essay class coincided with (collided with) the first week of my Coursera course, “Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World.”  I signed up for it because I have an overwhelming desire to be educated in the fullest, most liberal sense of the word.  Sadly, this ambition clashes with my overwhelming desire to rare back in the recliner and read for fun or watch DVDs.  Life is full of hard choices for us wannabe intellectuals.

I read the list of assigned books carefully before I joined up and saw NO mention of Grimm’s fairy tales.  I hate Grimm’s fairy tales, original and bowdlerized, and have since I was a child.  It seemed to me, when I read the list of assigned books, that the first assignment was to read  Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, one of which I love and the other of which I find confusing.  That darn White Knight, always falling off his horse.  What was that all about?!   So I had a pretty bad shock when I saw that the first assignment was actually to read a whole book of Grimm’s fairy tales and report on it; this during the week that I was trying to edit my essays and collect them in a portfolio for Professor K.

The Coursera essay assignment isn’t due until noon today, so I was unpleasantly surprised this morning to receive an email from them, scolding me.  How did they know I hadn’t read the fairy tales and wasn’t intending to submit a concise essay about them?!  Yikes!  But it turns out that they were admonishing me to share my thoughts in the Forum.  What they apparently don’t know is that I have already checked out the Forum.  The first thing I saw was an impertinent question regarding  my religious affiliation.  Why do you want to know, and what are you going to do with the information?, was my gut reaction.  (One can never be too paranoid, in my experience.)

So, okay.  As far as I’m concerned, the class starts with Alice in Wonderland.  I will read the assignment and write my concise essay.  I will share some of my thoughts on the Forum, and see what happens.

Us Bad Kids always redesign the syllabus to suit ourselves.