Uni geht sehr gut

...... and in English, that's "uni/university/college is going very well." Since I basically have a day off from homework (one essay to read and one review sheet to complete, and that's all that has to be done tomorrow), I figured that I would tell you a bit about my college experience! Since, ahem, I've been at college a full month Sunday, and a month in class as of the 24th......

I got a compliment from my German professor yesterday--we were doing an exercise in class, and after my answer she asked as always, "Is it right?" ::silence:: "Of course it's right; she has almost not missed anything in this class yet." --blush-- That is naturally exaggeration, but it is true that I always get more than 80% on my homework (she doesn't normally grade homework, it's a satisfactory/unsatisfactory deal--quizzes, tests, & papers are all that is graded), and that after getting a 92% on the third quiz I thought, "I must work harder on this"...... I tested into third-semester German, and could possibly have been even the semester above, but it is well.

Apart from German (which is my major; a life-goal of mine is to be multi-lingual, to really master at least one language besides my native English), I'm in Botany, Ancient Near East History, English Comp and Intro to Logic. Botany I'm perpetually ahead in the readings for; my professor likes his students to read the material after lecture, so we can focus on what he focused on in class, but he got slightly off-sync from his syllabus, so that he's covering some portion of the topic for last class still in this class. Like today he should have moved on to the anatomy of roots and leaves, but instead we are still on DNA & Mitosis (Tuesday's subject, officially), because we spent part of last Thursday still talking about Cytology, and that was because the Tuesday before we spent the beginning of class on Morphology. And so on and so on. So I am ahead in my reading--I read last night the portion that goes with what we discussed this period. Botany for Non-majors is definitely a fun class--I do not have particular trouble keeping up with the prof, either, though he does talk quite fast.

Ancient Near East History, besides being an absurdly long name for a class, with too many capitals, is also fun--it is interesting to compare his teaching style with my Botany professor's. They both use Powerpoint extensively, but that is more or less the end of the similarity. He also talks very quickly, but he's harder to take notes from because he's much less outline driven, plus a great deal of what he says is commentary on pictures of artifacts and the like that he sprinkles through. I tend to write down whatever strikes me as important, and try not to copy down his slides word for word. For one thing, he posts his Powerpoints on an OU website, and for another, if I can remember it in my own words, it's more likely to stick.

English Comp is, well, an English class. It's rather like (so far, at least) a course I took in high school called Critical Reading--there are four sections to this particular English Comp, the first of which is Scholarly Discourse. So we are reading and discussing and writing papers on scholarly essays, all of which have controversial subjects like literacy, equality in education, and so on. It's a bit of a hard class for me, since I am more or less 180 degrees from most of these writers--some of them, I actually feel that the more I think about the essays, the farther I get from the point, because the stance makes no sense to me. But we have an excellent teacher/discussion moderator (it's a discussion class, so he spends little time lecturing), so that makes it more bearable. We have I think only one or two, perhaps three, more weeks before we turn in the Scholarly papers and move on. Despite being harder on me than my other classes, it is also enjoyable, for the most part.

What left--ah, yes, Intro to Logic. I have a schedule chock-full of fun classes this semester, evidently, because this is another! A lot of students take Logic as a way to get out of College Algebra; I have no such mean motive, but am sincerely interested in the mechanics of logic, and always have been. :-D My professor deliberately set it up so that those who get it quickly can skip class Friday, and then he can concentrate on those who are having trouble. Me, I still have to go to class Friday, but need only do something very minimal. The goal is to get 40 points every week, which sort of acts as attendance & participation; I have 35. This is one class that actually stretches me, especially in symbolization of sentences and their manipulation (which is where we are now)--I think very logically and in a fairly straight line when I'm actually arguing something (though when just talking, I can do random with the best of them......), but manipulation of symbols is perhaps not my strongest point.

The hardest part of college is probably getting up in the morning, every morning, even though I go to bed earlier now than I did at home!