My first week of classes has come and gone. Overall, I like my schedule quite a bit, I only have one morning class, and the classes are fairly well spread out so that I only have 1 class every day and 2 classes on Tuesday & Thursday, giving me plenty of spare time nearly every day to play games and study.
Every semester I pick up 5 classes with the intention of dropping down to 4 after I see which is the one I want to drop the least. This semester I had to have 2 English classes of which I took The Figure of the Rake (some sort of lush not the garden equipment) and Recent fiction, the later seems interesting the former is the bigger requirement. I also took my usual gaming class which I didn’t want to lose so basically the two classes that I had as options which I needed to drop were Frank Lloyd Wright and Churches Under Hitler.
From the get go, I wanted to drop the Frank Lloyd Wright class as it was on two days a week, and ran till 5:15pm at night on Fridays (which interrupts my pick up for my daughter), so dropping this class would have allowed me a better schedule with her, but also given me Fridays off completely, and the Hitler class was also only one time a week as well as directly after my English class on Tuesday. However, the professor for Wright was really really good where the Hitler class had a somewhat boring prof as well as a ton of work to be done for it as well. This made it so I pretty much had to drop Hitler despite the fact that Wright would have been an easier drop.
Still, despite having a late class on Friday, I’m pretty appeased with my schedule. I am particularly excited about my Recent Fiction class, of which we are currently reading “Crying of Lot 49.” Which is a brilliant book written by Thomas Pynchon. The book has inspired me to think about my own book in different ways. For one, I have long struggled with the point of view of the book, largely being attracted to the first-person for the perspective I get, but understanding this to be a much more difficult type of book to read than the third-person perspective, even for myself. This book is written in the third-person omniscient which to me seems like a great compromise, giving a feel like the first-person gives, but without the much of the same difficulty. Overall, I think the book is brilliant and is a great start to the course, hopefully they are all as good as this one is.