So, today was my first day back at University after a two-month break. More specifically, since I took Addiction Studies as part of my Honours course last semester (which is part of the science faculty), this was my first day back in an "arts" classroom for the first time in close to two years.

I remembered today why doing an arts degree shits me sometimes: some people are really, really pretentious. As in, they will quite openly look down on people who haven't heard of a particular (obscure) text, or feel the need to ceaselessly interrupt the lecturer to add lofty remarks about a text that's being discussed, or sycophantically laugh at the lecturer's puns that are genuinely not that funny. Or worse, when a first-year student mistook T.S. Eliot for C.S. Lewis, there was this kind of mocking laughter that went around. It angers me when people who "know" something have to sneer at those who don't know - I mean, isn't everyone there to LEARN, anyway? What happened to some respect/common decency? I felt quite sorry for the first-year dude.

I'm posting this here for two reasons - mostly to vent, but also because, since many of us here are writers (and there are many pretentious writers, in my experience) and many more of us here are students of other things, I imagine you guys might have had similar experiences before? Discuss?