The First Week
Well, classes are underway once more. I've started my new specialties, COMM and ENGL, and six of my seven kid-lets are in school, including Raiden, now, who is five and just started kindergarten. Wow, I feel old.
Going over my classes, my first being "Intro to Archeology", which for a variety of reasons is not as interesting to me as I expected; this of course, is most likely due to the fact that there has been only one real lecture, as our professor was unavoidably detained ... in Mexico. I was late to his first lecture, as well, and the material is not really captivating enough, as it was a "fundamentals" piece on the basic concepts the course will review, not all that different in content from lectures I had in "Intro to Cultural Anthropology" last fall.
My second course proves to be a bit better, "Media & Society, which is the first course for Communications studies. A large "fish" class, but the audience is clearing out, already, due to the integrated format of the course; lectures are available via pod-casts, and class notes are on the course website. However, the professor has said that he will stress concepts sure to be on the exams during lectures with particularly low attendance. He has also encouraged us to call his office in the wee hours of morning, to leave messages about ... whatever we like, for a pod-cast he dubs, "1301 @ 12:01", which sounds like great fun, although I myself will probably not participate, as I tend to get to bed as early as possible. For this class, I also have a comic I wanted to do, suggested by our professor's warning to visit his office early on during his hours, lest he get bored and wander off by the time a student should arrive.
Note taking for "Intro to Communications Theory", another core "fish" level course, is proving to be troublesome, as our professor, whether he subscribes to the the theory or not, poses a lot of rhetorical questions during class, although he expects some sort of response to about 1/3 of them, as well. One has to sift his speech too much, to glean actual information, to actively take notes. I may just resort to a stenographic approach, to be sorted through later.
I absolutely love "Intro to Literary Studies", even though I find the key term "close reading" to be hilariously bourgeois; it's not really anything more than just reading, but to most minds I suppose it does involve that extra step of thinking about the work, then the sentences, then the words, and understanding all those levels of meaning. I had a "math class" moment right off, which is to say, having the teacher ask me to show my work, which is understandable, given that the aim of the course is not to bolster your ability to understand the written word, but to identify the parts of the whole which elucidate your understanding. We've covered several bits of turn of the 19th century poetry, most of which were fables about the (ironic) fleetingness of the physical and the permanence of the immaterial. I enjoyed Philip's presentation of "Ozymandias", although I felt his meanings tend to be too rooted in the poem's setting within the space of time, and not enough within the poem itself, but as the course is to improve this ability, perhaps it will be alright.
I'm not sure what to make of my last course, "Literature & Culture", as the professor has chosen to focus on the interaction between humans and the environment, with a special interest in Houston. This does not seem to me to be ideal for the study of literature, and our classes are mostly given over to discussions of nature and the impact society has on the world, although today we finally discussed some text on it; I did not enjoy the text at all, and found it a confused account, which as it happens may have been intentional, but which none the less was off putting.