Aleksandra the Great’s Exploits

Ricky and I had World Cultures: Chinese and Japanese Traditions bright and early today. The professor seems to be a pretty cool person—he’s moving the lectures off campus until the administration becomes more sensible, and he changed the structure of the class so we have two tests and no papers; we only have to do one-page responses to all of the readings. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to stay awake in the class without other entertainment, though; he’s one of those teachers that like to read passage after passage in front of the class.

I’m going to be a New Critic, for the semester, at least. My Literary Interpretation course, which I figured, since it’s required for English majors, would suck, is actually very cool. It’s more of a discussion than a lecture course, and it really has the potential to be like Connelly’s class. After all, I read over a fourth of the poems in high school, and I recognize most of the names from his class. The professor is young and has a nice accent, but admittedly she doesn’t compare (yet) to Connelly. Although we have six papers to write and discussion questions due every week, I predict Lit Interp (as she put it) will be my favorite class.

Calculus is very long—half an hour longer than any other course—but we get a break in the middle just like we used to in Mr. Miller’s. I didn’t have too much trouble following the class today (except for when he tried to show how Archimedes discovered pi); I guess even if I did throw out all of my notes I couldn’t rid myself of my knowledge of calc two years ago. I’ll probably keep the course, but I have to go to one more class to be certain. Reports on ratemyprofessors.com warn that he doesn’t teach and instead expects students to learn on their own from the book; we shall see.

Physics is more fun than biology. The professor for NatSci II: Brain and Behavior is from New Zealand and, like Olga from Lit Interp, has a nice accent. He isn’t nearly as engaging as Professor Adler (NatSci I professor), though, and he puts up outlines in a Power Point (or similar program) display. Not to mention there’s homework and classwork.

All in all, though, second semester seems rather good right now, but that’s probably because I’ve just done some English homework and, surprisingly, I enjoyed it very much. At the bookstore today I bought the Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms—although I had intended to just look up words online—because the professor said we needed to buy it. I’m glad I did. It’s actually fun (No, it isn’t nearly as humorous as, say, our old AP Euro text book, but it’s got so much information). The other books were all pretty expensive; and I had to buy my calculus book packaged together with two books for levels of math I will never take, just to increase the price (and, I guess, make a nice purchase for the math majors). A girl from my summer orientation is in both World Cultures and Lit Interp with me; amazingly, I know people in three of my classes.

Discovery: I like ramen. I’d never had it before lunch today (when I copied off Dave and ate ramen while watching Naruto) because I worried that I wouldn’t like it, but apparently I needn’t have been so hesitant. Tonight before dinner I bought three more cup noodles; when I actually do go to the Asian Convenience Store I’ll see about getting some more authentic-seeming ramen.

In other news, Palladium has pleasant new apple peach juice, which is an improvement from the old kiwi whatever juice. It goes nicely with the salads I’ve started having for dinner to protest the damn nightly rotisserie chicken.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 17th, 2006 at 10:07pm and is filed under College. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.