Back to School - Fall Semester

School started last week. As expected, I think I'm going to love Western Civilization and will struggle through Women's Literature. Both professors are a bit eccentric. That's OK, I like weird people.

I especially like history professors who are passionate about history and that certainly describes my Western Civ teacher. He has a huge library of primary sources and a house full of antiques that he has collected over the years, some of which he will bring in for us to see. He even does daily pod casts on the internet covering various historical subjects. His specialty or area of expertise is medieval and Early Western History, which is a little unusual but makes him that much more interesting as a lecturer. Plus, he doesn't require much reading. In fact, we wouldn't even have a textbook if it were up to him, but as he says "never cross the campus bookstore", they get testy.

My Women's Lit professor is the typical type of eccentric one expects to encounter in the halls of academia, a word she used no less than four times during our first class. She also mentioned, you know, just in conversation, her grad school work at least as many times and the fact that she is a trained such and such. I don't remember the word but it means that she's a stickler for sentence structure, consistent writing styles and such. Blah, blah, blah. Let's don't forget that she is the department head. Judging from the smugness she displayed while dropping that little tidbit during her lecture, I sure she would have capitalized it, too bad. I'm sure that you can guess by the title of the class, which she personally developed, that she leans a bit toward the feminist extreme. Add to all of this that she shares her home, not with a significant other, but two cats and you've got enough information to form a pretty good picture of what I'm up against this semester. This is why I hate general education classes, because there more than in any other classes, the college sees it as their duty to indoctrinate its students in humanism.

All that being said, since Women's Literature fulfills both the human diversity and writing intensive requirement as well as the literature requirement I need for my degree, there's no way I was going to miss out on this class. And to the professor's credit she recognized that this is the reason the class is always full. Further to her credit, she, the department head, is teaching a night class. So, I may be revising my initial opinion of her. Time will tell. I just felt sorry for the men in the class. But hey, they are there for the same reason I am: to fulfill requirements the college feels is politically necessary. Whatever!