Unadapted

Hi cool people-
Hm, it's been a while since I've last written in my blog.  I wonder why that would be?  Oh, I know:
High Holidays are over now!
OK, now that I can start collecting my thoughts and catching back up on my schoolwork, here's a thought that's been on my mind for a few weeks.
I've been taking a course out of Biology and Society, an upper-level seminar called "Food, Agriculture, and Society."  I'm taking the class in the hope that it will deepen my understanding of the subject of my thesis, which involves agriculture in France in the Vichy era.  Everyone else in the class, as far as I can tell, is in CALS, either studying international development, or nutrition, or something.  I haven't mentioned my status as a History-French double-major from Arts and Sciences (Arts and Crafts?), but I strongly suspect that the others notice that I do, in fact, know nothing.  At all.  It's really something of a downer to realize, especially seeing as I'm in my senior year of college, studying at an Ivy League university, but it's the truth.  If I make comments, they tend to be unhelpful, statements of the obvious, or just plain wrong.
I think that this must be how Engineers feel when they take History classes.  In retrospect, I now feel more than a little remorseful the way I've just assumed that everyone else in the classroom eats, sleeps, and breathes what I do, i.e. history.  When I talk about the "Third Republic," I'm not used to specifying the country which I'm describing: of course it's France.  Likewise, when I refer to the Abbasid Revolution, Maimonides, the Spanish Civil War, Deng Xiaoping, Aristophanes, Sukarno, Khruschev's "Thaw," the Haitian Revolution, Botticelli, Plutarch, Petrarch, Pinochet, or Pisistratus, I don't always remember that not everyone around me knows what I'm talking about.  I guess that it's a little bit similar to when, say, Josh Polevoy starts referring to Rabbinic authorities of whom I've never before heard, and I need to ask "where and when is Rabbi X ben Y," but at least then, I still understand the dialectic at play, and, usually, the question at stake.  In my BioSoc. class, I sometimes don't even know what's painfully obvious to everyone else in the room: last week it was that, no, pesticides do not seep into drinking water.  I didn't know that.
I'd like to think that this is good for my humility.  If it isn't I don't know how to solve that particular problem of mine.
Have a sweet New Year, everyone!
~JD