Pick a city in Europe and a year we¶

In college, my European history professor assigned an essay with the instructions "Pick a city in Europe and a year we've covered. Write about what happened during that year."

I thought "Obviously he doesn't just want ONE year, stripped of historical context or relevance...." https://t.co/XcedGgPqWT I picked Paris in 1791 as a focal point of the French revolution. I spent weeks refining a twelve-page treatise about the significance of the events of that year, in the context of both the preceding events and what they led to, all the way up to the Napoleonic era. By the end of it, I had produced what I felt was the best thing I had written to that point. I was immensely proud of myself, and relieved to have found a way to make something more than just "mindlessly parrot the events of one particular year." When I got it back, I saw that he had given me a 20%, with the note that I "hadn't followed the instructions."

He literally just wanted a bullet point list.

Anyway, college is not about expanding your horizons, it's about affirming your relevance to bourgeois hegemony.