An update on classes

I realized something while reading an email from my grandmother: I never seem to talk about my classes... just all the other stuff. So here for you today is a little overview of what I think of my classes.

Monday/Wednesday/Friday

Freshman Composition: While the title of the class makes it seem like it's the Anatomy of a Freshman (1 part scum, 1 part teenage angst, 2 parts awkward noobie feelings), it's just an English class. I've been just floating on the surface waiting for things to get difficult, to be honest. I know that I am a good writer, and every essay I've written so far has come back with a big fat 'A' at the top. Strange enough, this disappoints me a little. How on earth am I supposed to improve if I sail through the class?

French 101: One of my most difficult classes, though that is the nature of any language class. Every day I walk in and am overwhelmed with the amount of learning that the professor squeezes into one 50 minute class. We had our first test today, and it totally didn't suck. I feel like I might have even gotten a good grade. The professor often doesn't speak any English to us, and as the lessons get progressively more difficult this becomes a little bit of a problem. However, because I took Spanish for so long, I have language study habits down to an art form, and am more familiar with the structure of the language than a lot of other people in the class.

Algebra: This is the class that I struggle to get off my bum and go to every day. I have two hours between French and Algebra and I usually go home and eat a light lunch, get some work done, and then walk back to the campus. This class is so beyond easy that I have to remind myself to to pay attention. Often, I listen to half of the lecture and then work on the homework for that class.

On Wednesday afternoons, after algebra I go to do my French lab. The French lab is work on a CD that you complete and then print out to hand into the professor. Every other week, we watch a short five-minute video and then take a 10 question quiz over the video. Usually it takes me all of twenty minutes to complete.

Tuesday/Thursday

Intro to American Politics: This is the class that I take the most notes in. The professor stands at the front of the lecture hall and lectures for an hour and fifteen minutes. I started off hand writing notes, but then I realized that at the pace he covers things, I should bring my computer with me. It will save me, I think. I type very quickly and can get down whatever is important a lot more quickly than if I wrote it longhand. We have our first test coming up next week and I am not sure how difficult it would be. The professor is interesting and I really enjoy how he lectures. Politics has the potential to be a very dry subject, and he really makes it interesting.

In between classes, Abby and I walk to the Roadrunner cafe and eat lunch and usually pull out our laptops and go on facebook... or we cram for whatever quiz we have in our next classes. (I go to Astronomy and she goes to Sociology.)

Astronomy: Next to French, this is the class that is the hardest, though they are hard in different ways. Occasionally, I do feel like Science is a completely different language! The class is fact-intensive and requires a lot of deductive reasoning. He doesn't require a lot of math (which is good!) but it is a lot of critical thinking, and we actually do critical thinking exercises during class sometimes. It's a fascinating subject that has always been on my "list of things to learn more about". I am enjoying the class, and am glad that I can get a science credit out of the way while learning about something I enjoy. He'll have in-class quizzes of one question that don't count for anything, too (which is also good!). The first day of class, he gave out these sheets of paper with "A B C D" on each quarter of the paper, and to answer the question we fold up the paper to whatever answer we choose and hold it up. He made a joke the first day of "Low-tech answer system for a high-tech class".

There you have it! Those are my classes. I'm going to go write an essay now.