Mine was an environmental communications professor. She didn’t want to teach. We spent half the class slowly grading a 10 question pop quiz at a 5th grade level. We were juniors in college.
I can’t read Ursula K LeGuin because of her, and she had the audacity to give me a C on an Into the Wild paper, when my paper said the point of the book is that it’s dangerous to over romanticize nature. Her take was that we should aspire to be more like supertramp. We should go into the unknown and seek connection to ourselves through survival. Ok… and die in a bus??? I still dont get it!
by ascr22
1 Comment
Well, you’re right about Into the Wild, and Jon Krakauer was not writing that book as a model of what to do!
As a college teacher, and as someone who before that was of course a college student, been there, experienced that – I’ve had that teacher, and I’ve had that colleague. The thing is— why would you let someone whose opinion you don’t respect ruin a book or an author for you? When someone I really don’t respect dislikes an author I love, I figure that’s just another mark against them and a recommendation for the author!
Le Guin can be marvelous. Maybe try working on your way around whatever block it was – try something less famous by her, and don’t think of it as by her— Rocannon’s World (if you like scifi) or The Word for World is Forest (if you like political allegory novellas) or Wizard of Earthsea (fantasy). But you know how burned-out this woman was, and how badly she reads – leave her in your dust as you move on!