#overlap courses often have concrete examples of things they're focusing on

[rabbitindisguise]

Actually I think if writers and linguists are in the words fandom, that means artists and some physicists are in the light fandom, coders and mathematicians are in the numbers fandom, and textile designers and engineers are in the Squares fandom, etc etc etc

So art (regardless of if they're making books, paintings, video games, or a sweater) all benefits in some way from STEM fields. Most people are probably less frustrated that they're in Science™ classes than the fact that they probably want to stick to their Fandom. College courses that have overlapping fields should pay less attention to "whatever art/STEM class they can pass!" and start giving people classes that they would benefit from passing to begin with

Like, honestly, I'm still scandalized that I kept getting recommendations to take the "easiest science credit we offer" despite having 0 interest in repeating the basics I understood already in highschool. If someone told me to join a class on linguistics, rather than generic ~social science credit~ I would have jumped at the chance. Hell, there's dozens of ways to have overlap. I see it all the time with humanities. History courses about art. Art courses coupled with poetry. Why not the science of photography for art AND science students? The physics of cashmere. Math as a language vs code as a language vs English as a language.

Give students more options that don't artificially create a dividing line between the two groups of fields. Even if the above weren't true, this still acts as if I can't understand what a physics major is saying better than someone without any degree training because I was at least trained in Academia Speak. Students lack confidence in the "other" field because no one bothers to give them any in the first place

Anyway this post is just to say that I thought I was A Bad Artist because elementary school art didn't include enough written/scientific explanations for the exercises we were doing. You can create a hundred shaded cubes, if you don't know why you're even doing it the whole exercise is pointless. The idea that you just ~understand~ art through seeing it with your eyeballs centers primarily visual learners (which- ydy! Visual learning itself is rad) and that's why people assume if they can't do it automatically on the first try they can't at all. My ability to reproduce images from complete memory is utterly useless if I don't know how to reproduce images unless it's a cube- without the theory, I don't know that's how sunshine works because I have to be told the big picture stuff first.

On the other hand, I could Words at the first try because that's how I learn about stuff and things, and everything else has to be translated for my brain to get it. Woodshop had the same problem- they'd do a bunch of things and I'd be like "wtf" but if they just said I needed to screw until it was flush without me asking, I wouldn't have needed to ask, and I would just Do the thing. But since I could actually use my personal skills (creativity, memory, zest for life) with writing because I understood it, I have much higher grades in English. I even got praised for it more despite having equal amounts of ADHD at all times. Because the class is accessible to my learning style. If it wasn't accessible, then I wouldn't get compliments, despite having the same amount of so "innate talent" (practiced skills available) either way.

So many people are walking around thinking that they suck at English because they might understand it better through typography or audiobooks and the institution pits us against each other based on what we're naturally inclined towards. Institutions act the only way you can learn about English is through books and like the only way you learn art is through your eyeballs. I'm not "better" than someone that picked up reading picture books when they were older because they didn't have the right glasses to read, and I'm also not better than someone who finds doodling helpful and never got credit for their journal entries because they weren't words even if they were thinking about the text critically.

And like. This applies to fields. No one should be forced to write a book. Not only does that make for dense, incomprehensible texts but . . . remind me again who's reading them? Other STEM people mostly. Why would you do that. You incentivized a group of people to be good at science and nothing else, present them no methods to learn English skills they understand, no wonder they're so bad at it.

That's all on top of their professors not knowing how English works so they apply science logic to language while they also dismiss the field because they're never taught the benefits of reading in any meaningful sense- and even their scientific thinking shows extreme failures of thought because they don't understand even the most rudimentary English concepts.

And some things they think are just flat out incorrect. They believe humanities majors make less (not always) because there's less skill (never) or less capitalist value (blatantly false- look marketing). They think that because they're a STEM they can more accurately assess this information than, say, someone qualified, like a STEM in language related fields- saying things like Latin/English/Chinese is the only language worth knowing, acting like introduction clarity is less important than your graphs, thinking that their work is not conditional on the people that provide access to the materials in the first place.

Holy shit this post is long. Anyway academics should stop judging other people in their fandom, and schools and colleges should make it easier to learn in other fields than the auto fill assumption that because you're good with learning via words, you're going to go into English, and if you're good at learning through seeing things, you're going to go into art.