- A really heart-warming moment on The Amazing Race
- a fruit smoothie for breakfast, and vietnamese noodles for lunch at school
- a Kit Kat bar
- getting a necklace that I'd ordered quite some time ago with my one word for this year on it in the mail today.
- knocking a number of lingering and nagging tasks off of my to-do list when I got home tonight, but one in particular that had been there for weeks.
Monday, March 28, 2011
Daily 5 - Year 2, Day 224
Today's Daily 5:
Monday Again
It's Monday again, and after a very full last week and weekend, my brain is a little bit on overload and most definitely rambling.
I'm about half-way through my day of classes, time wise. Two more classes to go for the day, but one is three hours long.
My first class on Monday mornings is a tutorial for an introductory class that has been making me just a little bit crazy. Every week I show up for this tutorial, which is supposed to be an hour long, and make the (less than applicable) information presented in the lectures clear and applicable. Unfortunately, the tutorial is an exercise in futility. It almost never lasts more than 20 minutes of the allotted 60. Today the main point the TA was trying to communicate was this: Pop culture reflects ideas, and we are influenced by it differently than we are by academics. Really? Pop culture tries to influence us?
I try very hard when sitting in that tutorial to not think about just how much tuition I paid for this kind of junior high social studies quality exercise. I am greatly anticipating the moment when I get to fill out an evaluation of this course. I've been looking forward to the chance to be explicit on just how poor the course really is for the whole semester.
So, I need to get through about 4 more hours of classes. And then I have some catching up to do at home tonight - a bit of reading, a bit of writing, a bit of greek and latin review. But tomorrow, tomorrow I'm taking the day off (except for one class I need to attend). NO school work Tuesday!
Thankfully, as school goes, and even as personal commitments go, this week is less busy than the last several. Not, by any means slack, but a bit less busy. I need to start working on my last two term papers, but I have two weeks before they are due, and that is loads of time to produce what I hope will be high quality analysis of the topics and score me decent grades. Witch-hunting in early modern Europe and the life of Ernesto "Che" Guevara. How are those for diverse paper topics? (I may have let nearly all of my term paper topics be inspired by movies this semester... Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and one of my favorite movies of all time, "The Motorcycle Diaries").
Also, on another entirely random train of thought, compared to the style manual that I usually use, APA style is ugly. No justified margins, an indented paragraph first line. In text citations instead of nice clean footnotes. It's ugly. The one advantage as far as I can see is that you can use headings. That at least means that you eliminate the challenge of smooth and flowing transitions. After writing a paper in APA style over the weekend, I'm looking forward to going back to the Chicago style that I'm much more familiar with for the next two papers.
I'm looking forward to watching a couple of television shows online tonight while I do some of the catch-up on homework and cleaning and all the little tasks that I let slide to make it through the crazyness of last week. That sort of vegging is so needed right now. A little bit of television (the sort of reality television I favor - The Amazing Race and America's Next Great Restaurant). And maybe a little bit of reclaiming control of some stuff that had to slide in favor or more urgent things the last week or two. I can't wait!
I'm about half-way through my day of classes, time wise. Two more classes to go for the day, but one is three hours long.
My first class on Monday mornings is a tutorial for an introductory class that has been making me just a little bit crazy. Every week I show up for this tutorial, which is supposed to be an hour long, and make the (less than applicable) information presented in the lectures clear and applicable. Unfortunately, the tutorial is an exercise in futility. It almost never lasts more than 20 minutes of the allotted 60. Today the main point the TA was trying to communicate was this: Pop culture reflects ideas, and we are influenced by it differently than we are by academics. Really? Pop culture tries to influence us?
I try very hard when sitting in that tutorial to not think about just how much tuition I paid for this kind of junior high social studies quality exercise. I am greatly anticipating the moment when I get to fill out an evaluation of this course. I've been looking forward to the chance to be explicit on just how poor the course really is for the whole semester.
So, I need to get through about 4 more hours of classes. And then I have some catching up to do at home tonight - a bit of reading, a bit of writing, a bit of greek and latin review. But tomorrow, tomorrow I'm taking the day off (except for one class I need to attend). NO school work Tuesday!
Thankfully, as school goes, and even as personal commitments go, this week is less busy than the last several. Not, by any means slack, but a bit less busy. I need to start working on my last two term papers, but I have two weeks before they are due, and that is loads of time to produce what I hope will be high quality analysis of the topics and score me decent grades. Witch-hunting in early modern Europe and the life of Ernesto "Che" Guevara. How are those for diverse paper topics? (I may have let nearly all of my term paper topics be inspired by movies this semester... Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and one of my favorite movies of all time, "The Motorcycle Diaries").
Also, on another entirely random train of thought, compared to the style manual that I usually use, APA style is ugly. No justified margins, an indented paragraph first line. In text citations instead of nice clean footnotes. It's ugly. The one advantage as far as I can see is that you can use headings. That at least means that you eliminate the challenge of smooth and flowing transitions. After writing a paper in APA style over the weekend, I'm looking forward to going back to the Chicago style that I'm much more familiar with for the next two papers.
I'm looking forward to watching a couple of television shows online tonight while I do some of the catch-up on homework and cleaning and all the little tasks that I let slide to make it through the crazyness of last week. That sort of vegging is so needed right now. A little bit of television (the sort of reality television I favor - The Amazing Race and America's Next Great Restaurant). And maybe a little bit of reclaiming control of some stuff that had to slide in favor or more urgent things the last week or two. I can't wait!
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