like a man, not a boy
Good things:
My paper being recently completed and sent off to Herr Beilein
Knowing that after 6pm tomorrow I won't have school for four days (okay, so thats the routine every week, but its nice to push yourself through three/four hellish days to get to a couple clean ones)
Knowing that tomorrow night is Wednesday, which means going out!
My closet finally getting fixed, so at least now I have something resembling a place to store my clothing, instead of just one large shelf.
Newly purchased winter coat (Mom sighs with relief)
Bad things:
That paper... yeah, I don't think it was that good. (Es heisst: Das Verhaeltnis zwischen dem Kuenstler und der Gesellschaft in den literarischen Texten von Thomas Mann, ob du interessiert bist) I just spent the past hour going over it with a surprisingly nice hallmate of mine. I asked my next door neighbor far earlier in the night for help (with grammatical corrections, because its generally recommended to get a native speaker to look over your work if its anything important, though, obviously by this story its something I don't do all too often), but he was busy, and anyone else I felt somewhat comfortable asking was gone. But then Jack(y) came over because I bribed her with dinner, and with her timeless support I had the strength to go ask one more person. Robert totally went all out and spent like an hour going over it in his room before he even came to mine to go over it with me. They do surprise you sometimes, they do. And he has Band of Brothers! Maybe I can try to make friends yet.
School ALL DAY tomorrow... startin' the day off right by dragging myself out of bed at 7:30. The difference between dragging yourself out of bed here and dragging yourself out of bed in say, oh, Santa Cruz, is that here I am tossing this sleepy shell onto a bike for a mind-numbing bike ride, whereas at Santa Cruz I just sort of needed to grab a scarf and walk for a couple of minutes to class. Granted, it'd probably be a walk up a hill... but still. At my most lazy I would just go and catch a bus to class, but here... I think laziness would be something like walking my bike, which would take a good 15 minutes longer and with the bike traffic here would be a death wish. And speaking of bike riding, Monday morning I rode my bike to school in the snow. I am positive that that is the first time I've ever been able to say that.
I honestly cannot believe its almost December. As of Thursday I will have been in Europe for four months! I also cannot believe that its getting this far in the semester. I am reading the journals of friends from home and hearing about how the quarter there is almost finished, and though I feel like there is still quite a lot left of this semester, its going a lot faster than I would have expected. That is mostly bad because it seems like the work is really starting to pile up. So, last week I had my two Referate (oral reports). This week I had one essay for my Thomas Mann Tutorium. As far as big projects like that go, I think I have a test coming up in Wortschatzuebungen (the teacher of which, by the way, really reminds me of Aunt Caroline, and it is saying something that I make that connection because I haven't seen Caroline for years). For Thomas Mann I'll have one more paper to write, and then a final exam. For creative writing I have to write a chapter of a group story (lame) in early January, and I have to turn in an analytical paper sometime before January 31st (I think I am going to analyze a poem... for five to ten pages). THEN I think the last big thing will be my history paper, which is probably also due somewhere around the end of January. Like I mentioned before, five to ten thrilling pages of historical fluff about the 18th century English aristocracy and their relationship to nature.
I believe I've previously explained this, but the reason I have all these papers at the end of the quarter is because for most types of classes here students don't actually receive grades. They go to a class, and then far later they use the knowledge they learned in that class on some test... or something. I'm still a little unclear. What I know is that we have to jump through special (fiery) hoops to get grades (unfortunately there isn't some goodwill towards all men program where we could just get a good grade by showing up and looking interested... though its arguable that at least that last part would be hard to pull off all the time). So yeah, in actuality one could say that they do less work here, because less is assigned, but I know that isn't the case for me right now. But talking to Germans who have studied in the US, they remind us often that the workload there is ridiculous. The difference there is that at home we'll get a reading list, and you are expected to go out, buy the books, read the books, and know the information. For my history class Rita and I were asking Professor Wellenreuther if he had some suggestions for sources for our papers... and he pointed us in the direction of the history library. Uh-huh...
My paper being recently completed and sent off to Herr Beilein
Knowing that after 6pm tomorrow I won't have school for four days (okay, so thats the routine every week, but its nice to push yourself through three/four hellish days to get to a couple clean ones)
Knowing that tomorrow night is Wednesday, which means going out!
My closet finally getting fixed, so at least now I have something resembling a place to store my clothing, instead of just one large shelf.
Newly purchased winter coat (Mom sighs with relief)
Bad things:
That paper... yeah, I don't think it was that good. (Es heisst: Das Verhaeltnis zwischen dem Kuenstler und der Gesellschaft in den literarischen Texten von Thomas Mann, ob du interessiert bist) I just spent the past hour going over it with a surprisingly nice hallmate of mine. I asked my next door neighbor far earlier in the night for help (with grammatical corrections, because its generally recommended to get a native speaker to look over your work if its anything important, though, obviously by this story its something I don't do all too often), but he was busy, and anyone else I felt somewhat comfortable asking was gone. But then Jack(y) came over because I bribed her with dinner, and with her timeless support I had the strength to go ask one more person. Robert totally went all out and spent like an hour going over it in his room before he even came to mine to go over it with me. They do surprise you sometimes, they do. And he has Band of Brothers! Maybe I can try to make friends yet.
School ALL DAY tomorrow... startin' the day off right by dragging myself out of bed at 7:30. The difference between dragging yourself out of bed here and dragging yourself out of bed in say, oh, Santa Cruz, is that here I am tossing this sleepy shell onto a bike for a mind-numbing bike ride, whereas at Santa Cruz I just sort of needed to grab a scarf and walk for a couple of minutes to class. Granted, it'd probably be a walk up a hill... but still. At my most lazy I would just go and catch a bus to class, but here... I think laziness would be something like walking my bike, which would take a good 15 minutes longer and with the bike traffic here would be a death wish. And speaking of bike riding, Monday morning I rode my bike to school in the snow. I am positive that that is the first time I've ever been able to say that.
I honestly cannot believe its almost December. As of Thursday I will have been in Europe for four months! I also cannot believe that its getting this far in the semester. I am reading the journals of friends from home and hearing about how the quarter there is almost finished, and though I feel like there is still quite a lot left of this semester, its going a lot faster than I would have expected. That is mostly bad because it seems like the work is really starting to pile up. So, last week I had my two Referate (oral reports). This week I had one essay for my Thomas Mann Tutorium. As far as big projects like that go, I think I have a test coming up in Wortschatzuebungen (the teacher of which, by the way, really reminds me of Aunt Caroline, and it is saying something that I make that connection because I haven't seen Caroline for years). For Thomas Mann I'll have one more paper to write, and then a final exam. For creative writing I have to write a chapter of a group story (lame) in early January, and I have to turn in an analytical paper sometime before January 31st (I think I am going to analyze a poem... for five to ten pages). THEN I think the last big thing will be my history paper, which is probably also due somewhere around the end of January. Like I mentioned before, five to ten thrilling pages of historical fluff about the 18th century English aristocracy and their relationship to nature.
I believe I've previously explained this, but the reason I have all these papers at the end of the quarter is because for most types of classes here students don't actually receive grades. They go to a class, and then far later they use the knowledge they learned in that class on some test... or something. I'm still a little unclear. What I know is that we have to jump through special (fiery) hoops to get grades (unfortunately there isn't some goodwill towards all men program where we could just get a good grade by showing up and looking interested... though its arguable that at least that last part would be hard to pull off all the time). So yeah, in actuality one could say that they do less work here, because less is assigned, but I know that isn't the case for me right now. But talking to Germans who have studied in the US, they remind us often that the workload there is ridiculous. The difference there is that at home we'll get a reading list, and you are expected to go out, buy the books, read the books, and know the information. For my history class Rita and I were asking Professor Wellenreuther if he had some suggestions for sources for our papers... and he pointed us in the direction of the history library. Uh-huh...
posted by Meredesu at 11:43 PM
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