2 days and counting...tomorrow doesn't really count since I have my own class to teach, office hours and a 3 hour seminar - there won't be much study time available that day, so essentially, today's the last big day of studying....

The positive part is that I can see myself getting through everything I planned to study. That still doesn't address the worry that I'm studying the wrong things, but I've gotten good advice from previous test-takers and we've been sharing information between those of us who are taking it this year as to what resources we find that are useful in preparing. But the exam really demonstrates how different each of us is and our different approaches, not only in the way we study (I go running for study breaks while another colleague plays video games) but also in our approach to the material.

I've really enjoyed the study periods that we've had as a group and it saddens me that the kind of collaborative work that we are doing in preparing for this test is rare in the profession of my choice. Teaching and academic research (particularly in the Humanities) is a very solitary endeavour. You're the only one in front of the classroom, and you're usually the only one researching and writing papers, books, lectures, etc. Of course there are collaborations, you see those kinds of edited texts all the time, but the collaboration is usually with someone who also specializes in your field, which means he/she is not going to be in your department, but likely will work halfway across the continent, or even the world! Post-colonial studies in particular is broadly spread across countries.

That sense of teamwork is something that I'm sure I'll miss. The plus end I suppose is that you don't have to work with someone you don't like, but for the most part, I get along pretty well with people who I've worked with, and the people in my life who I've felt the most dislike for are those not necessarily who disagree with me, but who are dogmatic about their beliefs, perspective, or stance and cannot accept that they do not possess the god-given truth. In our post-industrial, postmodern, transnational, transitional world how can anyone make a claim that they possess any kind of truth?

The belief in one over-arching truth requires not only something that is large enough to encompass all experience, but that something also needs to be real and flexible enough to enact an actual effect in the world. If you're going to believe in something, shouldn't it at least be something that has some utilitarian relevance in the world? Shouldn't it be something that can actually DO something in the world we inhabit? In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, after the revelations of the renaissance, enlightenment, reformation etc. of the previous centuries, several things were posited as substitutions for the church as absolute truth. In a nostalgic turn to the classical world, people like Ruskin posited beauty as a universal truth. Humanism of course was an excellent candidate as well, and even history itself was tested as a way of understanding 'truth' in the world. Science made it big for a long time, holding sway well into the twentieth century, though the development of the nuclear age put an end to its supremacy as truth (however, I worked with a colleague who still ardently held the belief that science would save humanity from its ills).

So we float without an anchor...and for some people that's frightening. For others, the freedom that arises out of their liberation from the constraints of a universal truth is the sweetest freedom of all.

There are of course counter arguments, but that's my rant for the day. Adieu.