Back to School, without Rodney Dangerfield
Hopefully you people will forgive that last outburst. My head is back to normal now. Not that I didn't mean it. But still. I very rarely use this journal as a real journal, but I reserve the right. =b
Anyway, two days into class at UWF, and I can already tell I'm going to be one busy motherfucker. This is about what it's looking like:
I'm going to have to read two books per week, or sometimes three books every two weeks when I hit a lull.
I'm going to be writing three mini-papers per week on said books.
I'm going to be writing one or two original pieces per week of fiction/non-fiction/poetry or whatever.
None of this is counting the exams and major papers I'll have during the semester.
It also seems that my Modern Grammar and Usage course will include a fuckton of homework. I'm not too worried about that, though. It's cake. And all the tests are of the take-home variety. Awesome.
On the upside, I think I'm actually going to like all my classes and professors. Even my Modern Grammar and Usage class, which I expected to be incredibly dry and snore-worthy, appears to be perfectly livable, thanks to a badass professor. The heavy workload of my literature classes should be counterbalanced by my general enthusiasm for the material. I honestly think I'll have the most trouble in my creative writing class, despite being a writing major, solely because I'm out of the habit of writing regularly. On the upside, I should be able to dip into my backlog of material to get by every now and then when the workload gets too heavy for me.
All in all, it should be interesting to see how it works out. I've never had a full semester of classes that I found both fully engaging and challenging. In this case, my grammar class shouldn't be much of a challenge, and from the way my creative writing teacher grades, making the marks shouldn't be challenging, either. But the workload overall will be a bitch for me to keep up with, and while I've always aced my English and Lit classes, I have a feeling that my professor is the type that will push me to get better and actually learn something. They're all like that. It's refreshing.
Christ, I'm just happy to finally be working on my bachelor's degree. I don't have to take the silly bullshit required for Gordon Rule nonsense anymore. In a way, it's a double-edged sword; seeing as how 90% of the courses required for my major require an extremely heavy load of reading and/or writing, I'm going to have to get used to reading several books at once. I'm going to have to juggle papers. I'm going to have to find the time to read two or more books at once (in all likelihood, I'll end up having to take three lit-type classes in one semester at SOME point), write about all of them, and crank out my own original work with no fuck-off classes to provide a break in my schedule. But it's all shit that interests me, and that will hopefully make all the difference.
See, I'm just not used to working. Last semester, I only even attended about 20% of my Statistics classes. I never did any of the homework. Hey, he didn't collect it. Why bother? I deal with Statistics-related material at least five hundred times an hour every time I play poker. Sure, some of the stuff is outside that realm, but I had a firm enough background to slack off like a motherfucker and still pull a B.
And that's just recently. If something doesn't interest me, I soak up the material sufficiently to pull at least a B and then I slack like a bitch. My only rule is that I exert at least enough effort for a B. And that's mainly just because I've never gotten lower in college. In high school, sure. I totally fucked off. But if I'm paying for the shit, I'm going to get good marks. I just don't have the effort to excel in something I care about. I've pulled A's in classes I didn't care about before, but that's only because they were ridiculously easy; it wasn't through any supreme effort of mine. If a class was so mind-numbing that I couldn't find it in me to put in at least enough work for a B, I dropped it. Simple. If it was a required class, I'd just take it again when I had a lighter workload.
Now, I can't really do that. My workload is going to be huge every semester from here on out. I don't get any more freebies. I've just got to wonder if I can actually handle it. I've never had to really work very hard to do well in school--that not hubris, in case it sounds that way; it's simple fact which likely has more to do with the school system than anything else-- but it's pretty clear that is changing. In the past, the subjects I liked required even less effort, really, cause I soaked up the material with no effort, and could spew papers on command thanks to my natural long-windedness and analytical nature. But here is something almost entirely new to me: a full load of classes I actually like, with a staggering workload of work I find interesting. I could definitely see myself burning out after a semester or two and needing a break, but thus far, I just feel invigorated.
I suppose we'll see which way it goes. Wooha.
Anyway, two days into class at UWF, and I can already tell I'm going to be one busy motherfucker. This is about what it's looking like:
I'm going to have to read two books per week, or sometimes three books every two weeks when I hit a lull.
I'm going to be writing three mini-papers per week on said books.
I'm going to be writing one or two original pieces per week of fiction/non-fiction/poetry or whatever.
None of this is counting the exams and major papers I'll have during the semester.
It also seems that my Modern Grammar and Usage course will include a fuckton of homework. I'm not too worried about that, though. It's cake. And all the tests are of the take-home variety. Awesome.
On the upside, I think I'm actually going to like all my classes and professors. Even my Modern Grammar and Usage class, which I expected to be incredibly dry and snore-worthy, appears to be perfectly livable, thanks to a badass professor. The heavy workload of my literature classes should be counterbalanced by my general enthusiasm for the material. I honestly think I'll have the most trouble in my creative writing class, despite being a writing major, solely because I'm out of the habit of writing regularly. On the upside, I should be able to dip into my backlog of material to get by every now and then when the workload gets too heavy for me.
All in all, it should be interesting to see how it works out. I've never had a full semester of classes that I found both fully engaging and challenging. In this case, my grammar class shouldn't be much of a challenge, and from the way my creative writing teacher grades, making the marks shouldn't be challenging, either. But the workload overall will be a bitch for me to keep up with, and while I've always aced my English and Lit classes, I have a feeling that my professor is the type that will push me to get better and actually learn something. They're all like that. It's refreshing.
Christ, I'm just happy to finally be working on my bachelor's degree. I don't have to take the silly bullshit required for Gordon Rule nonsense anymore. In a way, it's a double-edged sword; seeing as how 90% of the courses required for my major require an extremely heavy load of reading and/or writing, I'm going to have to get used to reading several books at once. I'm going to have to juggle papers. I'm going to have to find the time to read two or more books at once (in all likelihood, I'll end up having to take three lit-type classes in one semester at SOME point), write about all of them, and crank out my own original work with no fuck-off classes to provide a break in my schedule. But it's all shit that interests me, and that will hopefully make all the difference.
See, I'm just not used to working. Last semester, I only even attended about 20% of my Statistics classes. I never did any of the homework. Hey, he didn't collect it. Why bother? I deal with Statistics-related material at least five hundred times an hour every time I play poker. Sure, some of the stuff is outside that realm, but I had a firm enough background to slack off like a motherfucker and still pull a B.
And that's just recently. If something doesn't interest me, I soak up the material sufficiently to pull at least a B and then I slack like a bitch. My only rule is that I exert at least enough effort for a B. And that's mainly just because I've never gotten lower in college. In high school, sure. I totally fucked off. But if I'm paying for the shit, I'm going to get good marks. I just don't have the effort to excel in something I care about. I've pulled A's in classes I didn't care about before, but that's only because they were ridiculously easy; it wasn't through any supreme effort of mine. If a class was so mind-numbing that I couldn't find it in me to put in at least enough work for a B, I dropped it. Simple. If it was a required class, I'd just take it again when I had a lighter workload.
Now, I can't really do that. My workload is going to be huge every semester from here on out. I don't get any more freebies. I've just got to wonder if I can actually handle it. I've never had to really work very hard to do well in school--that not hubris, in case it sounds that way; it's simple fact which likely has more to do with the school system than anything else-- but it's pretty clear that is changing. In the past, the subjects I liked required even less effort, really, cause I soaked up the material with no effort, and could spew papers on command thanks to my natural long-windedness and analytical nature. But here is something almost entirely new to me: a full load of classes I actually like, with a staggering workload of work I find interesting. I could definitely see myself burning out after a semester or two and needing a break, but thus far, I just feel invigorated.
I suppose we'll see which way it goes. Wooha.