Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Class So Far...

Turns out you DO learn valuable information on the first day of class...which doesn't have to do with major assignments' due dates.

My spring semester of college is officially in full swing, as of last week. Just like thousands of other bleary-eyed students, I harvested printed syllabi, ordered or purchased over-priced books for class, and basked in that lovely old sensation of stress becoming part of my constant sub-conscious once again.  This semester bodes well for me; my classes do not, for the first time in my college career, involve:

  • forced gen-ed credits which have nothing to do with my major 
  • out-of-class lab time 
  • dangerous machinery 
  • graded knot-tying 
  • science 
  • deadlines (in the newsprint publication sense)
  • foreign language
  • early mornings  

They do, however, involve tons of writing and reading - but that's what I actually enjoy, so no worries there, right? *crosses fingers*

While kicking off a semester is generally a huge pain, it does have its perks. Namely getting to know the professors and the nature of their classes, as both are generally not at all what you expected. My "Films and Context" class, for example, is listed as an english course, but involves reviewing films of the 1930's, with weekly screenings and discussions of said films....something I would've expected for, say, a film and video studies course.  Not only that, but the professor's grandfather was a big time movie producer and was behind many of the major films of the period...something she likes to note frequently.

My sociology professor is also fascinating, as she is working on her dissertation and probably not much older than any of us, her students. She insists we call her by her last name only, which makes me feel like I'm back in high school. Since she's a sociology professor I have a sneaking suspicion this is because of some study or survey about class performance and calling the teacher by their last name being directly correlated.

My writing professor, Mel (the same one who forced me to start this blog in the first place), is, as always, cheeky and challenging. If I don't have at least one solid short story written when I finish this class, I've promised to demand a refund from him personally. 

But my favorite so far is my poetry professor. The class meets only once a week for three hours - it's more like a workshop. The professor offers an art project option for those students who aren't so big on writing their own original work and prefer to express or depict others' poems through art. She provides six different mediums the student can choose from (photography, paint, sculpture, etc) and use to build an accompaniment to a cycle of poems we'll be reading through the semester....simple enough. At the bottom of the handout on it is,

"YOU MAY NOT USE BODILY FLUIDS AS ONE OF THE MATERIALS IN YOUR ART PROJECT"

As we all read this, she explained that yes, a student actually attempted to do just this a few years ago.  Her only comment was, "Goddard (the campus health facility) is down the street....if you're gonna do THAT, you need to head on over there." She also stipulated, "If your work creeps me out, you'll get an F. Keep your creep to yourself.".......I can tell I'm going to love this class.

It's refreshing to feel - at least at the outset - that my loan money is being well-spent for once.