First Day of School!

[DCDave]

So, I got my last grade this morning 

4.0 in grad school, yessssss!

SWEEET

[ellaguru]

Excellent, well done!

[Good Intentions]

Good fucking job, dude.

[G.C.R]

Excellent, davy! Have some breasts!

[clare]

Fantastic news davy!

Grace - where'd you get that (image)? My mum would love a t-shirt like that.

[jm]

Way to keep kickin ass, davy!  Woo, etc.!

[G.C.R]

Grace - where'd you get that (image)? My mum would love a t-shirt like that.

I used the unoriginal search engine, Google. I was actually looking for an image similar to the awesome 1980s badge that my mother has, which says "? ask a librarian!"

[davy]

Thanks everybody!

I guess I feel pretty good about the whole thing! Certainly beat the heck out of my first grad school experience.

[auto-da-fey]

My brother went back to college, at a Cal State school up in the desert. He's taking a U.S. history since Watergate class and called me to talk about the books. There was some good stuff there, like Natasha Zaretsky's No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline (which I never actually finished reading a few years ago but definitely dug), stuff on Reagan, the end of the cold war, etc. . . . and then Donald Westlake's The Ax.
Man, that is a pretty sweet--and unexpected--syllabus inclusion. I'm kind of jealous--of the teacher (for being so cool), and of my brother (who was surprised when I went on a tear raving about Westlake). He's also making them watch a film and analyze it, and the list is basically my personal canon of 70s downers, from Night Moves to Blue Collar to Cruising and then the big titles.

anyway, this post was apparently brought to you by my sense that I'm being somewhat left out of the fun stuff this fall, but it's a worthwhile trade-off on numerous other fronts. I just won't be assigning--or likely reading--Donald Westlake any time in the foreseeable future.

[morgan]

I have my first class tonight! Eek!

Edit: It doesn't say on the syllabus that we're supposed to have anything prepared for tonight, which makes me a little nervous. I mean, our class is two and a half hours long. What is the professor going to do with us for two and a half hours if we're not prepared to talk about anything? That's a long time.

[ellaguru]

Y'all start so early. I don't have class for another two weeks. Or I guess a week and a half now.

[alex]

I have my first class tonight! Eek!

Edit: It doesn't say on the syllabus that we're supposed to have anything prepared for tonight, which makes me a little nervous. I mean, our class is two and a half hours long. What is the professor going to do with us for two and a half hours if we're not prepared to talk about anything? That's a long time.

Is only this particular session supposed to be 2 and a half hours long, or is that just the length that all sessions of this class will be? Because in my experience, first meetings are usually shorter than those that will follow, yet that's usually not explicitly declared on the syllabus.

Of course, I'm also of the mind that, if you've run out of things to say, there's no point in having people stay around. If the discussion is done, I let the students go home, even if there's officially another 45 minutes to go.

Anyway, have fun, morgan!

Classes here start this week, too. Well, classes proper start next week, but the introductory days for 1st year students are this week. Which is fun, because they've positioned people outside the building to inform those new students of the fact that they can't park their bikes here and need to use the bicycle shed in a building a few blocks down, and they must have assumed I'm one of those 1st year students because they told me the same thing, and I had to awkwardly explain that actually, I work here.

[morgan]

Thanks, alex! All of the classes I'm taking this semester are two and a half hours long, but they only meet once a week. It's possible we'll get out early tonight, I guess. We'll probably just end up talking about public history in all of its glory!

So, re: the bike parking thing, alex, is there a special bike parking area outside of the building just for people who work there? Or do you get to bring your bikes into the building with you?

[davy]

Y'all start so early. I don't have class for another two weeks. Or I guess a week and a half now.

This is UGA's 3rd week of classes!

Gooooooo, Morgan!

[ellaguru]

I know. I don't know why we start so late. Canada is generally the week after Labour Day, not the week before, so we're always behind, but no classes until the 12th or whatever seems a little extreme.

[alex]

So, re: the bike parking thing, alex, is there a special bike parking area outside of the building just for people who work there? Or do you get to bring your bikes into the building with you?

It's a bicycle cellar. We have two of them, one for each of the faculty buildings: a staff-only one in a building that is mostly offices (though there is one big lecture hall, and students have to come here for administrative stuff); and one for students and staff in a building which is mostly lecture rooms (though there are some offices, too). I work in the building with the staff-only one, so of course that's where I park my bike.

The staff-only bicycle cellar is always very full between 10am and 5pm on weekdays during the semester, so I guess it is somewhat understandable that students can't access it, but of course it's still a weirdly hierarchical policy.

[alex]

I know. I don't know why we start so late. Canada is generally the week after Labour Day, not the week before, so we're always behind, but no classes until the 12th or whatever seems a little extreme.

If that's any consolation, the university semester in Austria doesn't start until October 1st. When I started studying, what that really meant was that you could start signing up for classes then but that the actual classes didn't start until a few weeks later, although as far as I understand, that has changed and classes now indeed start in the first week of October.

(edit: and no, the summer holidays didn't start freakishly late or anything, we just had 3 full months of them.)

[morgan]

It's awesome that so many people ride to school where you are, alex!

Our start date (today) is really messing up the schedule for a lot of classes. It means that I start one class this week (the one I have today), and my other two next week. For the class that I'm teaching, lectures are on Mondays and Wednesdays, so we didn't have any lectures this week and therefore aren't having any discussion sections this week -- and because Monday is Labor Day, we won't have the first lecture until Wednesday the 8th. I'm working with another professor who has a class that meets only on Monday nights, which means her first class won't actually happen until Monday the 13th. If you compare that to my class that's starting tonight (the 2nd), it makes the system seem really stupid.

[Chet]

In 16 days (!) I will be moving to Manchester, where I will be attending the University of Manchester.

I am shitloads of nervous about a whole bunch of things. Top of the list is that I won't actually be smrt enough.

[clare]

Go Chet! Sympathetic hugs for the worries though.

[Anne the Man]

I got the first C+ I've had in awhile yesterday. Apparently I didn't argue my thesis at all. Ironically this was an assignment I'd started a week before, rather than the all-nighters which get me A minuses. Blerg.

[silentsigh89]

I am now the only traditional student (read as: the only only one with any extra time) in the upperclass in my department. So while I'm not really that great at Russian, I am doing things like:

-Covering a class at hopkins tomorrow, including teaching the grammar points of the day and grading the homework (for a 3rd semester level russian class. eek.)

-Offering supplemental classes on the grammar being taught in class for three different levels of Russian

-Being paid pretty damn well.

But I am conflicted! I've always been the girl that does all the homework but doesn't really understand the language! I worry that the professors forgot about this and have unrealistic expectations! It's very nervewracking.

[Chet]

I got my schedule for my first semester! woo!

Mon 9.00-10.00 Reading Literature (Lecture)
Mon 12.00-13.00 American History to 1877 (Lecture)
Tues 10.00-11.00 Introduction to American Literature (Lecture)
Tues 11.00-12.00 Reading Literature (Seminar)
Weds 10.00-11.00 Introduction to American Literature (Seminar)
Thurs 14.00-15.00 American History to 1877 (Seminar)

plus there's an "Academic Development" class that's fitting in somewhere.

Freshers Week is on monday, classes start on the 27th! eeeeeeeek.

[elpollodiablo]

At first I was like "Jesus fuck, that's a lot of class time!" But then I added it up and realized it's actually *less* time than I weekly spend in class.

Are you teaching at all?

[Chet]

haha no, man!

i am going to be a "freshman" as you guys say.