The First Week

I put off writing a new entry until I'd had at least a taste of all my classes. It would have had it sooner if not for the snow day on the first freaking week of classes. Tuesday was cancelled before my first class even started. So, first impressions then?

Advanced World Literature actually should have been called Post-colonial Literature because that's all it is. Not sure why it was named the way it was. I have it three days a week at noon. Thus far, I'm pretty underwhelmed. It sounds like it's going to be one of those "Europeans were like soooo mean to their colonies and stuff" types of classes. Filtered through literature.

Don't get me wrong, colonialism wasn't exactly a proud moment of human history, but that message gets lost or at least watered down when you hear it over and over. It's the same reason I've never been able to get into African-American literature; the Civil Rights movement and evils of racism was shoved in my face every year for so long that it lost any potency or ability to move me. I never needed anyone to go through the baby steps of why it was wrong and infantilizing a subject that complicated completely turned me off of it.

Anyway, getting back on tangent, I'm not really looking forward to this class. Next;

Fiction II. I have to write an 8 page short story. Not looking forward to that, but I've got a few months. The professor is hit-and-miss with me - sometimes I like her, sometimes I wonder why she's teaching. We'll see how this one goes.

American Literature II. Or Romanticism. I've heard good things about this professor (namely, he's funny and his classes are easy), so that's a plus. On the other hand, the book list doesn't seem all that riveting. Same thing for American Dream, which is with the same professor, and will be focused on a single theme instead of a genre or time period. I've never had a class like that, so it might be neat.

Pattern Recognition intrigues me. I'm still not quite sure what the class is about quite yet. Obviously it has to do with patterns, but I'm not really sure how to explain it. The interested can find the syllabus here if so inclined.

And of course I'm going to love my Independent Study. I thought I was just going to be helping Minnick refine his radio scripts, but it turns out that I'll be writing a few of them as well. At the same time, I'll keep working on my postcards and try to get 2-3 done every week. Right now, he has me researching some authors and I'd like to get at least one draft done by this weekend. We'll need as much time to edit as we can get.