Reader Position

Despite how much I hated waking up to take notes for a 9AM class I wasn't even enrolled in, I truly miss it. Last quarter I was a reader for Professor Robert Garfias who is a Professor in the Social Sciences and lectures for classes about Ethnomusicology. Wiki defines ethnomusicology as "the study of social and cultural aspects of music and dance in local and global contexts." African and Afro-American Music was the first class i took with him in Spring 2008. I wrote my Humanities Core Course Research paper on the dundun drum which got me a nomination for the UROP at UCI. Drums truly are the pulse of a nation.

This also made me realize how what a wonderful resource a UC library can be. You can find anything you want, and sifting through the sands of history by turning the pages of a book is exhilirating. Looking through the library's special collections is like a free hands-on museum. Quite franky it's as close as I'm ever going to get to becoming a fedora donning adventurer in Egypt, searching for pieces to be featured in exhibits. A girl can dream.

Anyways, I was a reader for his Music of Indonesia and the Philippines class and enrolled in his Music as an Expressive Culture class. Lucky me. I got to see him MWF at 9AM and 11Am. As a reader I was required to attend class MWF to take notes so that I could grade their midterms and finals. No one in the class knew I was a reader, so I was undercover, his little minion I guess. He asked me to tutor this girl who I will call "Jane." Small, meek, asian girl. Spectacles instead of glasses, laptop and extremely asian pencil case in hand at all times. It was hard for me to pretend to care about the material when I had just been mindlessly transcribing notes.

We went to Science Library to study and the first thing she says is, "What do you think will be on the final?" I labelled her immediately because I like to thing I am pretty good at reading people. Science major. "I think he's going to talk about the evolution of an instrument again." Probably a Bio Sci major, they always have to use dialtecal reasoning.

She stared up at me waiting for an answer, her glasses slowly sliding down her nose until she pushed them up with her hand.

"Well I'd say that's a pretty good guess." I was fucking clueless. "Is there anything you don't understand or would want clarified?"

She ignores my question. "What do you think will be on the Final?"

I quickly scan my notes which seem to be written in Arabic. As if my handwriting weren't bad enough, at 9AM it's abhorrent.

"Maybe somehting about how a musical style that is characteristic of a particular region becomes a mark of national identity?"

She quickly fumbles through her notebook and pushes her packet of highlighters aside to write that down. And the rest of the 1 1/2 pretty much goes like this.

This made me realize that most students aren't like me at all. Here to learn, ready to dive into material. She treated it as if it were something to conquer. It also made me realize that as much as I hated the position, I loved travelling the world vicariously through the slides and music he played in class. I was getting paid to learn, which is exactly what I want to do. I'm terrified of teaching, but I think that worst comes to worst that is probably what I will end up doing. That or research.

I later found out she was a former Bio Sci major who switched to Anthro last summer. I can see that she has potential, because she had a better grasp of some of the material than I did so it showed that she understood parts of it. She seems to be in that Scientific mind to Humanistic mind transition.

I cannot see how anyone can go through college and not want to learn about the world around them. It perplexes me.

My curiosity will probably be the death of me.