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And ... classes are underway!
Must remember to pay for them on Friday ... it being the deadline, and all.
Given that it's been 12 years since I dropped out, I'm a little surprised how many people I still know on campus. I havetwo classes one class (obviously I should take a math class!) with ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
senri, three with petecas, and two with a woman who grew up near where I grew up -- and those who know anything about my childhood will recognize what the odds are against that!
So I'm taking twelve credits this semester, and things are shaping up as follows:
Intro to Art History - I suspect I will get a lot of reading done in this class. I've already taken the second semester (in 1996, but it's not like there have been that many new developments since) and anyway, I already know all this stuff; pre-Renaissance art is my area of interest. I'm hoping we'll have a chance to get into some of it in more depth, but looking at the amount of material we're trying to cover this semester, I'm not hopeful.
History of Photography - This one, on the other hand, promises to be a lot of fun. Having these back-to-back, taught by the same professor, is a really interesting demonstration of the difference between lower-division and upper-division classes in the same general subject area. Here, it's assumed that we don't need to rehash the basics and we can move on to actually learning stuff.
Alaska Native Cultures - For the social science credit I still need, and because I'm interested. The instructor seems very enthusiastic and knowledgable about the subject matter, and will be bringing in a number of Native guest speakers rather than simply giving us (white) outsiders' views. On the other hand, I don't know how long I'm going to last before I start popping up my hand and pointing out bias in the way the material is being presented to us. For example, he's mentioned that we don't know much about Native cultures prior to 1750 because of the lack of historical records, but then turns around and talks about "historical" contact with the Norse -- where, unless I am remembering incorrectly, everything that we know about Norse settlement in the New World and Greenland is taken from oral sagas that weren't written down until hundreds of years later. This was not mentioned in class, of course; it's just that Norse contact is considered "historical" whereas Native oral tradition is not. In what way are Norse oral tales about an outsider group considered more accurate than Native oral tales about themselves? And so forth.
It's actually very interesting, since three of the four classes I'm taking this semester are history classes, to notice how much more skeptical and critical I am now than I was when I was a barely-out-of-my-teens undergrad. I remember thinking critically about the subject matter, but not the presentation -- that is, now I'm sitting in history classes thinking, "Where are we getting this information? Who is drawing these conclusions in this textbook that are being presented as facts? What is revealed about their biases in the way this information is presented to us?" And I don't ever remember thinking that way when I was younger.
Anyway, back to the litany of classes:
Beginning Sculpture - The one studio art class I hadn't taken yet, and I'm not too optimistic about my ability to do well in the class; I'm not particularly interested and don't feel like I have much aptitude for it. (Orion: "So you don't want to take the class because you don't already know the subject matter." Um. I am an over-achiever. XD) I guess I should caveat by saying that I think learning traditional sculpture techniques would be incredibly fun. I think spending an entire semester with a bucket of clay, a block of wood and some carving tools would be awesome. But this is modern sculpture, which is basically shop class except the objects you're making aren't useful. Most modern sculpture is neither interesting nor beautiful to me, so the idea of creating it is not especially appealing. We'll be starting off by making one bronze cast, which does look kinda fun, but otherwise it's bandsaws and welding all the way. On the plus side, the instructor really knows her stuff and will happily describe in great detail the function and maintenance of every power tool in the room, which may be generally useful knowledge to have.
So! Those are my classes! And I finally got my books. You can't, paradoxically, buy books from the UAF bookstore anymore; you have to order them online, and then you have to wait to have them delivered. And I am told, and can't disagree, that it's generally a good idea to attend the first day of class before ordering books; that way you know how many of them are actually necessary and whether you're keeping the class at all. So we've all been flailing hilariously through a week of classes without our books, but the Fedex box came this morning with *cough choke* $400 worth of books in it.
Technically UAF has a service where they'll run off copies of the first chapter of a book for you, to use until you get your books, but some of my books were not in their system and for one of the only two that they could help me with, they printed chapter one when the required reading was actually the introduction. And the book which was supposed to be on reserve in the library ... wasn't. *headdesk*
Anyway, I got books, got classes, and got homework. And now I will go figure out whether to start reading my shiny books or work on Freebird for a while. Or go check out the progress of the beaver dam upstream, instead.
Given that it's been 12 years since I dropped out, I'm a little surprised how many people I still know on campus. I have
senri, three with petecas, and two with a woman who grew up near where I grew up -- and those who know anything about my childhood will recognize what the odds are against that!So I'm taking twelve credits this semester, and things are shaping up as follows:
Intro to Art History - I suspect I will get a lot of reading done in this class. I've already taken the second semester (in 1996, but it's not like there have been that many new developments since) and anyway, I already know all this stuff; pre-Renaissance art is my area of interest. I'm hoping we'll have a chance to get into some of it in more depth, but looking at the amount of material we're trying to cover this semester, I'm not hopeful.
History of Photography - This one, on the other hand, promises to be a lot of fun. Having these back-to-back, taught by the same professor, is a really interesting demonstration of the difference between lower-division and upper-division classes in the same general subject area. Here, it's assumed that we don't need to rehash the basics and we can move on to actually learning stuff.
Alaska Native Cultures - For the social science credit I still need, and because I'm interested. The instructor seems very enthusiastic and knowledgable about the subject matter, and will be bringing in a number of Native guest speakers rather than simply giving us (white) outsiders' views. On the other hand, I don't know how long I'm going to last before I start popping up my hand and pointing out bias in the way the material is being presented to us. For example, he's mentioned that we don't know much about Native cultures prior to 1750 because of the lack of historical records, but then turns around and talks about "historical" contact with the Norse -- where, unless I am remembering incorrectly, everything that we know about Norse settlement in the New World and Greenland is taken from oral sagas that weren't written down until hundreds of years later. This was not mentioned in class, of course; it's just that Norse contact is considered "historical" whereas Native oral tradition is not. In what way are Norse oral tales about an outsider group considered more accurate than Native oral tales about themselves? And so forth.
It's actually very interesting, since three of the four classes I'm taking this semester are history classes, to notice how much more skeptical and critical I am now than I was when I was a barely-out-of-my-teens undergrad. I remember thinking critically about the subject matter, but not the presentation -- that is, now I'm sitting in history classes thinking, "Where are we getting this information? Who is drawing these conclusions in this textbook that are being presented as facts? What is revealed about their biases in the way this information is presented to us?" And I don't ever remember thinking that way when I was younger.
Anyway, back to the litany of classes:
Beginning Sculpture - The one studio art class I hadn't taken yet, and I'm not too optimistic about my ability to do well in the class; I'm not particularly interested and don't feel like I have much aptitude for it. (Orion: "So you don't want to take the class because you don't already know the subject matter." Um. I am an over-achiever. XD) I guess I should caveat by saying that I think learning traditional sculpture techniques would be incredibly fun. I think spending an entire semester with a bucket of clay, a block of wood and some carving tools would be awesome. But this is modern sculpture, which is basically shop class except the objects you're making aren't useful. Most modern sculpture is neither interesting nor beautiful to me, so the idea of creating it is not especially appealing. We'll be starting off by making one bronze cast, which does look kinda fun, but otherwise it's bandsaws and welding all the way. On the plus side, the instructor really knows her stuff and will happily describe in great detail the function and maintenance of every power tool in the room, which may be generally useful knowledge to have.
So! Those are my classes! And I finally got my books. You can't, paradoxically, buy books from the UAF bookstore anymore; you have to order them online, and then you have to wait to have them delivered. And I am told, and can't disagree, that it's generally a good idea to attend the first day of class before ordering books; that way you know how many of them are actually necessary and whether you're keeping the class at all. So we've all been flailing hilariously through a week of classes without our books, but the Fedex box came this morning with *cough choke* $400 worth of books in it.
Technically UAF has a service where they'll run off copies of the first chapter of a book for you, to use until you get your books, but some of my books were not in their system and for one of the only two that they could help me with, they printed chapter one when the required reading was actually the introduction. And the book which was supposed to be on reserve in the library ... wasn't. *headdesk*
Anyway, I got books, got classes, and got homework. And now I will go figure out whether to start reading my shiny books or work on Freebird for a while. Or go check out the progress of the beaver dam upstream, instead.