School and Life in General

tulips for sale on the market square


Good MORNING, everybody!

Well, it's 11:15 - but technically, that is still morning.

I'm enjoying the weekend. Currently, I'm sitting at the computer at my desk with a cup of tea and some ginger ontbijtkoek (breakfastcake). Since Friday at about 8 I have been very relaxed. Today, the plan is to get a lot of work done, so I don't get extremely stressed during the week - which is what happened last week.

The think is, this semester is going to be extraordinarily tough. I know I'm in my 4th semester now, and I'm taking 300-level courses now, and completing tracks, and the like. But it's still been much tougher than usual.

This is partially due to RA's new policy: continuous assessment. Or is it continuing assessment? Well, along those lines. Apparently, a lot of students complained that their grades depended mostly on assignments that weren't assessed until the last few weeks of the semester, so RA decided to change that and spread the workload out over the entire semester.

What it means is that you are plunged immediately into an insane amount of work. It also means that you will probably be completely immersed in an insane amount of work for the entire 16 weeks of the semester. Before, the first three or four weeks were usually pretty low-key, with maybe an informal presentation and a short paper. Things didn't get very tough until week 5 or so, just a few weeks before mid-terms.

But now we are expected to present on topics that we have been studying for only two weeks. Take, for example, my linguistics class.

The first day of class, we went to A&H 326 Linguisitic theories and Linguistic Practice. Our textbook is 500+ pages, and titled "Cognitive Linguistics." Sure enough, Ernestine (who guided me through Rhetoric & Argumentation last fall and sociolinguistics the semester before that) opened the class with this announcement:

"Linguistic Theories and Linguistic Practice is Professor Janse's title for a course, but he's not here, so I've taken over for him, and at RA, it's really hard to change the title of the course. So the title is still the old course title, but really, we're going to be studying COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS. It's a course to prepare you for a masters in linguistics."

Doom! I don't even want a masters in linguistics! I just want to learn about the languages themselves. I want to learn about historical languages and languages that die.

Then, in week 3 - which was last week - we had to do group presentations. My topic? "Discuss the evidence for cross-linguistic variation in semantic systems. Is this evidence convincing?"

I don't even know what that MEANS yet.

Well, now I do - kind of - since I had to do a presentation on it.

In stylistics (for which I also have Ernestine), we also had to do group presentations, but those were must more straightforward and doable. My group analyzed the Seamus Heaney poem 'Digging'. And it didn't even go very terribly. So far, stylistics is definitely my favorite. I tend not to give myself enough credit, and sometimes the analyses seem to be much harder when I have to do them at home on my own than when we do them in class. But I'm getting the hang of it, and enjoying it, and even looking forward to writing the term paper.

I'm also taking Film in Context and Journalism. Film is taught by Chad Weidner, from Nebraska. The class, so far, is very light and I'm just fine with that. My only complaint is the insane amount of group projects and things that require meetings. This week, for example, we are meeting on Wednesday night from 630 - 8 to watch "Modern Times". I'm all for it, but couldn't we have met from, say, 730 - 9? Because I'm getting sick of missing dinner all the time!

Journalism is also nice, but strange because it is an "All-day Wednesday" class. Most courses are broken up into two two-hour sessions in the week, but a few courses are offered for four hours just on Wednesday - usually when the teachers are visiting instructors who teach at other places, or similar. In this case, Anya Luscombe is also the press manager for RA, so I guess that she's just a bit busy to be working on all that. It's a good class so far, but I've only been to two - originally, I was enrolled in "Introduction to American Studies", but found that, since it is taught by an American woman, it really did not seem that I would be getting a different perspective on American history than what I got in IB History of the Americas in 11th grade. So I switched into Journalism (which I had originally not been able to take because I had to take film. Even though I didn't really want to, my tutor thought it important that I take it).

It's interesting to note that this semester, all three of my teachers are native English speakers - but all speak a different variety of English. Anya Luscombe is (half Dutch, half) English, and Ernestine is Canadian (from Nova Scotia, I think), and then of course there is Chad Weidner from Nebraska. Even more interesting is that before I switched to journalism, I had American Studies with a teacher from New York. (She and Chad were very contrasting, I thought. Chad is basically on a first-name basis with his students and she preferred to be called Dr.)

On top of these courses, I am swamped with meetings, meetings, meetings. Last week, I believe I had a total of 9 or 10. This is due to Tabula Rasa, Contra, and group projects. I can't wait till the instructors get over their affiliation for group projects. It's really much nicer to do work on your own time and not have to rush back and forth between home and school 7 times in one day.

But I finally made it to the weekend. Yesterday, I went to Vlissingen to visit my friend Eva, who just moved there two weeks ago. She has received special permission from RA to move in with her boyfriend. Although she had first been adamant that none of us should see her new house before it was entirely ready, she broke down and invited some of us over for the day.

I got there at 1 (it's a 20-minute bus ride) and we went first to a little bagel cafe for lunch. I think I haven't had a bagel since 2005. Can that actually be possible? I had cinnamon raisin with walnut-honey cream cheese. Fatty. Tasty. Nice.

Then we went "shopping", in the student sense of the word. I bought chocolate Easter eggs at HEMA and a miniature, half-off agenda, in which I will keep track of meetings and meetings alone. We tried on clothes here and there, sighed over nice shoes and those great sweatshirts with the fun designs on them (like safety pins and birds and such), and finished around 4 with a cup of tea and coffee in a cafe. I actually went to that cafe once before, with Anand, Dilyana, and Katharine last September/October. I brought my knitting, so I worked on my scarf while we talked about school and life and such. This is one of the reasons I like Eva - besides the fact that she is nice, sweet, thoughtful, funny, and all of those good things, she also has a life outside RA - more so now that she does not even live in Middelburg - and it is always nice to talk to her about "real" life.

After coffee, we walked to her house - it is very nice, though not yet complete. Funnily enough, the layout is almost identical to the layout of the place where she and Mishi (her boyfriend) lived in Middelburg.

Anne joined us around 5, and for dinner we made mashed potatoes and kebabs with sausages and mushrooms, and Eva threw together a nice sauce. For dessert, she whipped up a chocolate chiffon cake with bananas and whipped cream. We ate while watching "The Girl in the Cafe", starring Bill Nighy. Not quite as happy as I had remembered it being, but still very nice. And I got a lot more work done on my scarf.

At 1030, Anne and I caught the bus back to Middelburg. Being one of the largest cities in Zeeland, you'd think that the buses would run later than 10:45, but they don't. It's a bummer because it would be nice to go to Vlissingen on a Friday night from time to time, but that would only work if the buses went until 12 or 1 am.

When I got home, though, I made a cup of green tea and did some preliminary research in my Let's Go Europe and (outdated) Lonely Planet: Dublin guide book. I'm considering Dublin as my spring break destination - since I could leave Middelburg the Wednesday before break begins, come back on Tuesday or Wednesday, and still have half a week to study! I'm not certain it will work well, though, since that weekend is Easter weekend, and I'm afraid that everything will be closed from Friday to Monday. It would also be a little bit ironic to arrive in Dublin only 2 or 3 days after St. Patrick's Day! But I am really liking the idea of Irish stew with a glass of Guinness and a good book by an Irish author...