Academia

Seeing as this entire process that I've embarked upon is called "Study Abroad," I should probably provide some insight into the whole "studying" aspect of my "abroad" experience. Well, here goes...

The Radcliffe Camera, one of the
Bodleian Library's many reading rooms,
convienently located next to Hertford.

The way things work at Oxford, at least for the humanities, is that each student takes two tutorials: a primary and a secondary. As their titles suggest, you supposedly spend more time on your primary tutorial than you do your secondary, mostly due to the fact that your primary tute meets twice as often as your secondary. That is to say, for Oxford's 8 week terms, a primary tute meets 8 times (once a week) and a secondary meets 4 times (once every other week). For those of us who are less inclined to math (or, rather "maths"), the discovery that I would only be meeting with my tutors for a grand total of 12 hours over the span of 8 weeks was quite shocking. Compared to the approximately 12 hours of class a week at home, this seemingly tiny number of hours spent in tutes at first seemed quite laughable.

Now, before any Kenyon-ites feel the need to express their outrage or even jealousy, I must make it clear that I am working. No, let me rephrase using the proper amount of text-based emphasis: I am WORKING, bold, italicized, and underlined. While I may "only" have 12 hours of actual tutorials,  most of my daytime hours are dedicated to the study of Arthurian Legend (my primary tute) and Modern British Drama (my secondary), which both require (unsurprisingly) numerous hours of reading, many word documents full of note-taking, and late nights of essay-writing. As of now, the end of 4th Week, I have written approximately 41,940 words either total, 11,961 of which belong to essays. Not that I'm counting. Or that I used this tallying as a way to procrastinate last night as I finished up my essay for my tute this afternoon....

The "mysterious" entry to Hertford's Library.

A tute is not really comparable to a class back in the states. It's more like office hours: you have a prearranged meeting time and come to your tutor's office to meet one-on-one for an hour. For me, I must bring two copies of my essay for the week's tutorial with me, one for me and one for my tutor. Why you may ask? Well,  because both of my tutes begin with me reading out my essay to the tutor as he marks up his copy. Depending on the tute, I might be stopped and asked to explain myself or to clarify along the way, or I will have to just keep drudging through my paper as I hear my tutor busily scratching out, editing, and tearing up the words that I have just read to him.

Needless to say, it's just a bit stressful. Reading a 2,500 word essay isn't exactly easy, especially when you have carefully avoided reading anything aloud all your life, preferring to hear other people's eloquent voices to your own voice's inability to do more than stumble and stagger its way across the page. Also, those words that keep tripping you up are your own, not some published author who most likely has been paid to string together the trickiest set of phrases with the express purpose to be read aloud by poor, unsuspecting students. No. I only have myself to blame. By the end of page five, not only am I winded as a result of choking on my own ineloquence (ha, ineloquence is not a word... I'll leave it in there irony's sake), but my mouth feels like I just attempted to eat six saltines in less than a minute.  Awesome.

Luckily enough for me, my primary tutor always makes tea. That is, if he hasn't accidentally kicked the teacup across the room in attempt to find a stapler. True story.