Saturday, September 6, 2008

the run down.

I'm ridiculously in love with college.
Because I'm so in love with it, I don't even mind the difficulty of the classes or the sheer amount of homework. But, for the sake of posterity, here is a rundown on all the classes I'm taking.

CHIN101: Elementary Chinese
m_w_f: 9-9:50
_t___: 9:30-10:20

This is one of those classes that I really want to take and yet really don't want to take at the same time. It has been my dream to learn Chinese for a long time, but at the same time, this is a very difficult class. It is really hard to start fresh in a language that has nothing to do with English, has a different writing system, and is absotively posolutely nothing alike. It is frustrating for me to not understand anything. I'm used to knowing and understanding. Another thing that is slightly irritating is that the teacher has the course very much dependent on technology, a lot of the homework, a lot of everything is on the internet, but she has it set up for PC use. At least 80 percent of my class uses Macs, she asked. I hopefully will get that cleared up today, but who knows. I'm considering dropping it for this semester. I want to learn, but it is really really overwhelming. Especially if I want to do crew, I don't know that I have enough time to commit to crew and Chinese. If I do drop it, I probably will take it later in my college career when I'm used to the workload, when I'm used to everything.

FREN230: Advanced French
_t_t_: 12:30-1:50

This is my other difficult class. The whole class speaks about doubly as well as myself. I kept up, I understood what was being said, and I read very very well, but I do not speak like the rest of my class. I was REALLY nervous about it after the first day, but I emailed one of the two wonderful professors and she reassured me that they are confident that I am in the right class. She also said that sometimes it takes a few weeks to get back into speaking French. She'll let me know when the conversation hours are, and I'll be able to go have conversation for an hour. The first test was Thursday and I did in the middle of my class. Some people missed a lot more, so we are retaking it. I will be able to improve my score. I think that I'll probably survive. I'll have to work hard, but I'll be alright. 

COMM252A: Public Communication Campaigns
_t_t_: 2:00-3:20

This class will be pretty easy, and probably interesting. It is about different types of communication campaigns (except political) such as commercials, PSAs, etc. We get to pick a campaign (like the Montana Meth Project or the campaign to get girls vaccinated against HPV, or the clickit or ticket campaign) and we write 4 papers on the particular campaign over the course of the semester. Each paper is on a certain aspect of it, and the final paper is on how you would change and evolve the campaign to make it more effective. So far we've watched PSAs, like the Sarah Mcloughlin Ad for ASPCA and this one. It is pretty interesting and I met a few people in there, I actually ate lunch with one cool kid, so I'm fairly excited.

GEOL115A: Geomythology
m_w_f: 10:00-10:50 

I thoroughly enjoy this class. I'm going to have to go check out a mythology book from the library but I really like this class. We are learning about the real possible geological events that coincide with the myth, such as the sinking of atlantis, Noah's flood, and the Garden of Eden. We will also study some myths of the pacific NorthWest.. For this class I get to pick a myth or a geological event, and write a final paper about when it truly could have happened or what myths might have sprung from that event, respectively. I also get to go on a field trip to somewhere in Eastern Washington. I'm excited to see what this class has in store, considering I have liked all of the reading so far.

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