Archive for College
Quote of the Day
· Comments“Sir, I am sitting in the smallest room in the house.
I have your letter before me. Soon it will be behind me.”
- Voltaire responds to a critic.
Work Smarter, Not Harder
· CommentsI’m sitting here in my Modern European Novel class listening to person after person whine and complain about how hard James Joyce’s Ulysses is so far. We made it all of the way through Flaubert’s Madame Bovary already, and they haven’t figured out the biggest characteristic of our professor: he likes to tell you EXACTLY what you need to know for the study guides and exams.
This is my second course with this professor, so I came in knowing this about him, but now they have no excuse. For my Summer semester British Lit 1900-1945 class, I started reading the first story and realized that he just stands up there and talks about every important paragraph, sentence, motif, character, and author style that we need to know. Why read the stinking books? I have a life, and a busy one at that. I’m not going to waste my time reading the thing if I’m just going to be spoonfed directly from the maker of the exams.
So, for 13 weeks, two nights per week, 4 hours per night, I sat there and worked on websites and recorded his lecture while taking sparse notes and got an A-. I have no plans on changing my tactics this semester, and I am not sure why no one else can see this pattern after three 3-hour classes with him. These are juniors and seniors with 100+ credit hours. Can’t they see a free ride when they get one? As long as you can write coherent sentences and regurgitate his major points, you score easy points.
That’s all I have for now… gotta load up Word and get the notes file ready for class.
Biting Off More Than I Can Chew
· CommentsIt seemed like a good idea at the time: take 12 hours of classes this summer because they are short semesters and one of them is online. After my first week of summer session, that’s not such a wise thing after all.
Taking that courseload was going to be a sacrifice, and we knew that, but until you take that sacrifice for a test drive, it’s just not possible to get the full effect of what the next 15 weeks were going to be like. This week went like this:
- Left home at 6:15am Monday, got off at 3:00, got my books, ate dinner, arrived at school, and got home at 9:30pm.
- Left home at 6:15am Tuesday, got off at 3:00, ate dinner, arrived at school, and got home at 9:20pm.
- Left home at 6:30am (pretty tired) Wednesday, got off at 3:00, ate dinner, arrived at school, and got home at 9:20pm.
- Went back to bed to sleep until the last minute and left in a rush at 6:30, got to my desk, logged into the USF website, and dropped my Monday/Wednesday class.
I feel much better now that I’ve done that. I was missing our small group on Mondays, putting in too many hours away from home, spending extra money on gas and eating out, and I could see that for the next 15 weeks I was going to be doing a pretty “average” job at everything and leaving loose ends everywhere.
I can’t operate like that. My plate needs to be full, but I need to be able to clear it on a whim in case other stuff (especially paying stuff) comes up. Nothing like someone saying they want to pay you $1,000 to do something that takes a few evenings to do, but not be able to commit to doing it, right?
So, I’m still taking one online class and one on-campus class each semester session this summer with a 3 week overlap for the two campus classes. Not too bad. Life just got simpler.
I hope hope most of you are aware that I’m a non-fiction writing major at the University of South Florida (go Bulls!) and wrapping up my Junior year this Fall. Good, because I am getting tired of typing out Professional and Technical Writing so many times.
One of the benefits of so many literature and writing courses is producing writing material. I’m checking to see if there is any interest in checking out my work and using it as bonus content on the blog to defer some content to other days. That said, here is a sample of my last paper for Expository Writing, which earned a 96%, and I know there are two typos in it to take care of before posting the entire thing. Here goes nothing:
Boob Tube or YouTube?
Technology has a way of shaking things up from time to time. The staple of the music industry for decades was the vinyl record, which gave way to CDs, which have been left on dusty shelves since the advent of online music sales. No one wants to buy an entire CD of second-rate songs when they only want the one smash hit to listen to until they can sing it backwards. The next big revolution is targeting television and the way we watch programming. Why would anyone want to sit in front of the TV with all of its commercials and drawn-out programming?
