Journal after5's Journal: School, books, etc 1
Since I have not done this yet, I figure I shall talk about the classes in which I am enrolled.
As you all know, I go to Georgia Tech. We are not a liberal arts college, in fact, we pretty much frown on any person who is not an engineer. Even those who attend our own school. There is a hierarchy of respect, at the bottom lie those who don't have to take higher maths and such.
Management majors; Industrial Design; Industrial (Imaginary) engineers; History, Technology, and Society, etc.
Where is this going? Well, to put it short, we, the masochistic students of Tech don't really go well with humanities. We avoid them at all costs. But yet, guess what I have taken all summer? That's right, humanities.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the arts and history, I can do pretty well in those areas, they just aren't what I choose to spend my time in.
When we were travelling, we took two courses: European Composers and European Treasures.
The composers course had us going to various concerts in the different cities we were in, writing reports on them, etc. It was a lot of fun and I had a great time.
The treasures course was not so fun. I had my issues with the course which I will not go into here as it isn't the proper place to vent. I did fill up two pages of tiny handwritten notes and critiques for the powers that be to modify the course to make it better. For those of you who know my penchant for BS and whine, well, I'm sure you can guess that I did a bang up job.
Moving on to Oxford...
Medieval England - this course is rather fun. Our professor (Dr. Carol Moore) is a published fanatic of the era and is also a former Dean of students. She loves what she does and it somewhat rubs off on the students. I say somewhat because history can be quite dull to teach when you only have 6 weeks to cram in over a thousand years of kings, queens, and countless intermarriages. But it's a fun course and for the final project I get to write a story instead of write a paper. Which suits me just fine, I have ideas percolating in my head that are just dying to be let out.
Ethics - Yes, for some reason my major (Electrical/Computer Engineering) requires the students to take an ethics course. Go figure. Our professor (Dr. Jason Borenstein, good name) is about, oh, 27 or so. Graduated from Emory amongst other schools. Served on a couple ethics panels, teaches another course (Science & Law) here at Oxford for GT students. He's a good guy, it's nice to try and debate different theories of ethics. Now that we've "mastered" the basic theories we're ready to tackle topics of Abortion, Death Penalty, Euthenasia, etc.
We're at the halfway mark now (three weeks left) and things are progressing well in both classes. Either way I'm glad to get my humanities and social sciences completely finished (yes, out of 130 hours I only am required to take 12 hours of humanities, life is great).
Rereading what I have wrote...man that is boring. Why do you people come back here again? I promise I'll talk about something more interesting next time. In the mean time, my guitar is feeling lonely, and I need to learn a song before I go to bed.
Humanities is Good for the Soul (Score:1)