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In the interest of jumpstarting my return to academia early, I decided to take an online course from a local community college. Amy gave me the idea, she mentioned that a friend of hers had taken several classes online that transferred back to KU for full credit. So I spent some time looking through the list of transferrable classes and found that I could take a class that would cover my Western Civ II requirement. At least, that's what I thought I found. I would later discover that they added to the transfer list a notice indicating that one must take both the class in which I was enrolled, as well as another class, offered only in person, in order to fulfill the Western Civ II requirement. Now, most people would be reasonably upset at this turn of events. I feel that in order to fully communicate the sorrow and rage that I feel, I must describe how utterly ridiculous this class had been.
When I was in seventh grade, I had a class called World History. This class was a far more competent survey of history than the community college class I just endured. We were given weekly reading assignments, and a list of quetsions to answer. What made this unique was the apparent insecurity of the instructor. Each assignment had at least one question intended to make us apply what we'd learned (read: nothing) to our contemporary lives. The questions were also frequently worded to double as a reminder of the absolute importance of the study of history and historians. For example:
Our examination of the slave trade can show how vital the study of history is to our contemporary selves in that historians show us how not to repeat the crimes of our past. Write a few sentences providing evidence to support this claim
Ug. In addition to this, he would make exhaustive use of abbreviations such as "HL" (historical literacy) that would require trolling through everything he had previously written to find a definition.
The worst by far, however, were the assignments that required that we write a few sentences from the point of view of whatever culture we read about that week, making sure to identify who we were in the process. So...roleplaying? For college credit? That was the plan anyway.
Needless to say, I dropped the class the moment I found out it wasn't going to count for anything. I had a hard enough time forcing myself to do the homework when I thought there was a point. Here's hoping that my return to actual college work will be a bit more stimulating.
Posted at: 08:45
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Hello, you may remember me from such infrequent entries as my comments on the decapitation of K-State fans, or my description of my trip to Toronto.
A lot has happened since last we spoke. I spurned independence by moving back in with my parents in order to more effectively save money for tuition. I feel like I've regressed about a decade, and for some reason need constant validation for every decision I make. Not really sure how that happened, but it's pretty disconcerting.
I'm enrolled for the Summer, or should I say that I am currently enrolled for the Summer. Every aspect of getting readmitted has been an incredible hassle. I've had to call the Registrar's office about five times since December and argue with minimum-waged freshmen that answer the phones.
Spent the weekend painting my room. I spent around five hours taping the unpaintables and doing all the fine detail work. I left to get some dinner, and when I got back 20 minutes later I found the room totally painted. Turns out the roller work is a bit less intense.
I'm playing with a new CMS that is a lot more lightweight than wordpress. I got tired of it taking a minute to two for my pretty minimalist wordpress installation to render. Things are kind of basic as of the time of writing, but I should be able to spice things up a bit
Posted at: 18:21
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