Sunday, January 23, 2011

School

So I suppose a few people might be curious about how school is going for me now that I'm back in the saddle?

Overall, not bad.  They've been keeping me busy but not to the point of instant life crisis mode that GWC always was trying to put me in.  The teachers simply show up expecting us to learn, I expect them to teach, so far this is going pretty well.  I haven't made up my mind on trying to go to the school to officially get notice or accommodation for AS, but the option is still there.  I keep worrying I'll have another one of those days where I regress my ability to track the structure of group conversations and will accidentally be disruptive to class or something.  That has actually happened to me once before when I was at GWC and it was quite memorable, I think my teacher wanted to kill me.

So far I haven't had any problems with switching between teachers.  That used to be a big problem at GWC.  You spent practically all your time with one teacher and at transition points during the semester, guest lectures or any situation in which I switched who was leading my class discussion and I'd struggle to switch between which set of nonverbal and verbal cues were used to run and organize class interactions.  I've had so much trouble with that in the past that on the first days of class with a new teacher I'll take notes on how they run their class along with whatever they are actually talking about.

My individual classes are each going well.  ENG 1010 is half boring me to death and half very interesting.  The textbook and methodology they are using to teach writing is very good and I'm sure I can improve lots using it.  However, the textbook and class are also aimed at an audience of people who are terrified of writing.  I'm not terrified of writing.  I broke my fears years ago with a lot of writing I did for my own use and haven't turned back since.  A few genres I still struggle with, such as creative short story, but this is a academic prose class, I don't expect to have to write fictional adventures.

Wild 2000 has only met once so far because its a once a week class and it was canceled last week.  So far I like the teacher and feel I will enjoy his class.  It's an advising class so I won't say I'm learning a ton of information about the environment, but I will say I'm learning a lot about the university and how things work inside the major.  Everything so far seems to suggest I did my research really well when I picked what I wanted to major in.

Stat 2000 is boring but promises to get un-boring quickly.  There's only so much you can learn about bar charts, histograms and time plots.  I now know more about them then I did before, but nothing note worthy.  The lecture material points to us moving beyond my field of knowledge pretty quickly, so I expect to hash out a good amount of real progress in this class.

I attended a trip with the Audubon Society recently to get credit towards my wildlands class.  Very fun.  Don't think I've ever spotted so many birds of prey in such a short period of time before.  And having a barn owl fly right over your head is amazing.  Those are beautiful birds.  No pictures, sorry forgot to bring the camera.  Owl's website is still without an owl.

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