Get A Bit Classy

I’m alive! I know I haven’t posted in almost a week, but the Spring 2010 semester has officially begun, and so has my new internship (yay!). So being a full-time student with two jobs will undoubtedly result in less frequent posting.

So since my classes will be taking up most of my time, I figured I’d talk about my classes a little so that y’all know what I’m spending my time doing and can then behave with an appropriate amount of jealousy or something.

M/Th at 8:30am – Astronomy

All I know about this class is that it involves studying stars. So this will probably be my favorite class! And on Mondays from 10-12, we get to do a lab. I’m assuming this will involve Botox, lipo, lectures from Mariah’s retouchers, etc.

M/Th at 2pm – Writer’s Workshop

At the end of my freshman year, I decided to add a creative writing minor. Writer’s Workshop is the final course in the minor. This course is geared toward creating one long piece rather than many short ones (like the other creative writing courses). Students are encouraged to write either a novel or novella, or a cohesive book of poems or short stories. I started a story in my Fiction Workshop class last spring and think that I will be working mostly on expanding that story. I have twenty pages of it so far, but the page requirement for fiction is 75-100, so I have a lot more to add. I wish I was brave enough to try to write a cohesive book of poetry, but my poems usually aren’t related thematically or even stylistically at times.

This is the FOURTH class I’ve taken with the same professor. I think that’s cool because he saw the work I submitted in Intro to Creative Writing and Fiction Workshop, so he’s seen the progress I hope I’ve been making.

T/F at 2pm – From the Renaissance to the Postmodern: The Fairy Tale Tradition

Often referred to as “my fairy tale” class, this course is the capstone to my major. (Yay! Two capstones in one semester!) I actually signed up to take a different capstone but that one was canceled and my class was dropped into this one. When I found out, I shed a flood of hot tears, but now that I’ve had a few homework assignments from this class, I am so glad I got switched into it.

In this class, we read and analyze fairy tales, starting with the Father of the Fairy Tale (Straparola, 1550s) and ending with contemporary retellings of the tales. On the first day of class, my professor told us to ignore what we thought we knew about fairy tales—they are not for children, do not need to have a moral (that’s a fable), do not always have happy endings, and are not primarily an oral tradition but a literary one. She then called Disney, “the D word” and encouraged us to use it only sparingly in class.

So I’ve started reading the fairy tales and they are HILARIOUS. I love:
- the extremely dramatic way characters deal with grief (“[The nurses] found them both lying dead. Immediately they began to scream and to shed a flood of tears. They tore their hair and their garments and laid their breasts bare.”)
- the terrible displays of ‘pity’ or ‘compassion,’ (“But when they saw how lovely and gracious she was, they were moved to pity and decided not to murder her. But they cut off both her hands from her body and tore her eyes out of her head.”)
- the scolding of angry mothers (“Stop it, and get out of my sight! Go break your neck somewhere! Take off. You’ve ripped apart my guts, and I can’t stand you anymore. My hernia swells up, and my goiter grows each time you appear. Stop coming here. From now on this house is like fire for you. I wash my hands of you and consider that I never spewed you forth into this world.”)
- the general funny descriptions (“He rubbed his eyes with his hands and stretched his arms for half an hour with sixty yawns and farts in the form of a dialogue.”)

Never has my homework made me LOL like these fairy tales do. I am definitely reading these stories to my kids! [Oh, and btw, my BFFL Josh took this class when he was in school!)

T/F at 4pm – Applied Liberal Arts Mathematics

Ugh, sick! This class is called “Applied Liberal Arts Math” which means “Math for Dummies.” It’s required that I take one math course, so I chose this easy one. So far, we’ve learned two methods of splitting your assets when you get divorced or separated (unlike Brangelina, who are staying together! LIARS!) or want to fight over inheritance. ZzZzZzZz….

So what classes are y’all taking this semester?!?!