Fall 2009: Semester in Review
Dec. 30th, 2009 03:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
violetclmThough my lack of communication indicates otherwise, this was a pretty light semester, aided in part by one of my classes being Intro to Linguistic Analysis, the intro course for the department. Ling majors are generally expected to take it sophomore year, but I didn't know I was going to be a Ling major at the time, and anything called "Morphosyntactic Typology" sounded far more exciting. Later, of course, I discovered that Morphosyntactic Typology, or MST, is expected to be taken junior year. Anyway, half of IntroLing I more or less knew already, and then most of the rest was stuff I didn't care for, so it was a mixed bag. On the other hand, there were quite a number of people I knew in the class, in one section or another -- the whole Linguistics sophomore class was there, essentially, plus a bunch of random other people -- so that was an interesting experience and made for occasional problem set (/teacher) discussion, which has been largely absent in my life since Chem freshman year, bits of MST with Amy aside. (Said Amy, of course, happened to drop by and patronize one of the IntroLing study sessions, rightly enough.) I was hardly the only person in the class to be pretty confident about most of the material and wary of the phonology, and that attitude carried through to the final, which many people were happy to start at the last minute, sure it would be fine. The class was at 9 AM, but I only missed it the once, and that was because I was already awake and doing homework for another class. One day I even went to class because I went to sleep the previous night in the Quest office (which I managed to procure a key to for indefinite length of rascally times) and happened to wake up before 9, which I had resolved would be the deciding factor. (It was not a day of class in which I was destined to learn anything new... rather, I was asked what I was even doing there by the teacher. Rather a sad state of affairs.)
After IntroLing there was a forty-minute wait until Intro Greek. (To be fair, Intro Greek also met on Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays and was not preceded by Ling, but everything else was TuTh so I'm just talking about those days.) Unless I had printing to do or some other such errand, these forty minutes were generally spent priming myself for whatever that day's quiz would be on, because Greek had a short quiz every day. And talking to Jenny, but let's say that didn't happen much because most talking we did in that window was time she was supposed to be in class. Greek took a little while to get started at the beginning of the semester, because the teacher had swine flu, so we had a week or two with another professor teaching it (as well as one day with a student, which was a new experience at Reed and went absolutely horribly), but things settled down into a simple rhythm not too long after that. Unlike German, (Attic) Greek is a dead language, so there was no focus on conversation and little on speed of production, work was dedicated to comprehension and production of text with verbal performance a secondary concern. It has far more endings to deal with, meaning that the first semester is little more than morphology with syntax playing a bigger role in the second semester, but I think I did pretty well on the tests and exams, and again only missed one class, on the same day for the same reason. The five worst daily tests are dropped, anyway, so one of the dropped tests will just be a 0. So far Greek has come up a couple times, like I know that "Moira" means "fate" and I wrote "Have a happy day of the Jesus" (that being the best Greek translation I could come up with) on one of Nicola's christmas cards on the trip back to Santa Cruz for winter break, but I certainly don't expect any conversations in it.
At that point it was noon, and Tuesdays I was a lunch host for the school, alongside one of the other Greek students (a classics major) and a girl named Taya (anthro). Lunch hosting is my first successful foray into the world of Reed admissions... they wouldn't take me as a dorm host or tour guide, but as soon as I applied for a job that didn't pay anything (other than free lunch once a week), that was fine. Pssh. Anyhow, lunch hosting was a lot of fun and I definitely think I got better at it as the semester went on... basically, we'd go into the admissions office and be given one, two, four, five, some number of prospective students, high school juniors or seniors or what have you, and we would go to commons and chat about Reed for an hour. Some were definitely better fits for Reed than others... probably the most memorable incident was the two girls who later resurfaced hanging around the staircase to the GCC basement, so I took them to the fantasy dorm for a couple hours where they had a fabulous time and were given strawberry soda to drink and admired all the window art. The strangest kid was a small, bespectacled one from Texas or thereabouts who was worried that there weren't enough conservatives at Reed and wondered if he would get along with people if he came here. But hey, free lunch! Count me in.
Depending on if I felt like it or had homework to do or whatever, some days after lunch I'd go to Advanced Topics in Syntax, which I was auditing because it only had four real enrolled students in it and I had been told it was a fun time. It was definitely an interesting experience being in a class and not doing any of the homework for it, though I imagine there are some people who get away with that for classes they are signed up for, at least as far as reading goes if not turned-in assignments. It was a fun class, and I learned some things, and we were pretty social, as I guess befits an upper level class. I don't want to spend time exclusively with Ling majors by any means, but as time goes on I do seem to meet more of them, and they can be interesting people at times, I suppose. The teacher is new and Russian and is only so good at communicating with students, plus the subject matter was a bit complicated so there were numerous numerous silences, and I always felt a little odd about being the one to answer questions because I didn't want to get in the way of people being graded for their participation.
After that was Dialects of English. Well, sometimes... on at least five different occasions the DoE teacher sent out an email a few hours beforehand announcing that there wouldn't be class that day, which he would then spend some time the next class meeting explaining, and no recompensation for the lost value was ever given, but on average, after that was Dialects of English, my introduction to the Sociolinguistic side of the department, to be followed by Language and Society, the new official Reed introduction to the Sociolinguistic side of the department. Teehee. This class eventually descended into chaos, and we got through many half of the things we supposedly planned to (but then who knows, seeing as we never got a syllabus), but the first half of it (so the first academic quarter) was all right and we did get some interesting stuff to read. This class too had a lot of people I knew in it, but of the older set, juniors and seniors, at least for the most part. Girl-Sam snuck in too. The teacher is a visiting professor, and has been for some years, and his position is opening up to be permanent next year, and it's unclear whether he'll get it or if some outside applicant will. Should make for exciting classroom blogging, I guess.
Finishing up the school day was Directing I. I've already written here at great length about the first scene I directed for the class... I'm not going to go into nearly as much, or practically any, detail about the second, but suffice it to say that it did not go very well and I don't want to dwell on it. Costumes looked good, blocking mostly worked, but casting was faulty, sound cues were missed, lighting was iffy, and lines weren't memorized. When not focused on sets of scenes, the class had a lot of presentations on famous directors (their lives and philosophies) and discussion of the schedule. For two weeks we collaborated with a Choreography class in the dance department, which was largely a waste of time but hopefully amused some people. It was definitely a change of pace telling my peers what to do and having them usually go with it, and I enjoyed the class, though I don't really know how it's going to be graded.
I wasn't at Lane at all this semester, marking a radical departure from freshman and sophomore years. I was informed at the last minute that the musical theater program wasn't happening that semester, with money going to a band program instead, and while I poked a creative writing program/class/workshop/doohickey into existence, it didn't end up being compatible with my schedule. I applied for the position of LASER program coordinator, essentially the person who manages all the Lane interns and mentors from Reed and makes sure they're doing well and addresses all their problems and whatnot, but was ultimately unsuccessful. Now I just have to try not to resent the person who did get the job -- on the one hand, she's bad at answering emails, but on the other hand, she's very nice and apologetic about it.
Some of the time gained from doing neither Lane nor the Quest was put into a Bollywood-style dance that a Reed student was directing and choreographing. There were eight girls and four boys and we met to rehearse/learn new parts of the dance once or twice or thrice a week for most of the semester, until we finally performed it first at Reed's own Diwali festival, put on by the same student, and then twice at the Fall Dance Concert, which I am more accustomed to experiencing from the other side of the stage. I wasn't a very good dancer by any means, but I committed myself, and I think only failed to be punctual when necessary the once. Toward the end of the semester I put the dance music on a few times in the student lounge across from the bookstore when no one else was in there and practiced the moves, eliciting a few askance looks, but no one stopped to stare for minutes or anything epic like that. There are a few videos online but they either only cover part of the dance or do their best only to film the part of the stage that I'm not on. Us boys looked boring, but all the girls had amazing outfits which I (and they) coveted like whoa.
Another Reed department taking a very slight interest in me is academic support: I was recommended and subsequently trained to be an individual tutor for Introductory Syntax and Morphosyntactic Typology. The former has no prerequisites and will probably be taken by several people with little background or talent in the field, so that should be good next semester, but in general the only people who take MST are those who are already good at it and thus don't want my help, no matter how much time they spend talking to each other about the problem sets. Individual tutors meet with individual students for periods of one hour, generally, and I logged exactly one hour of tutoring work this semester for exactly one student, though I also got paid for attending a few training sessions. May work pick up in the future!
Speaking of that last word, I'm living off-campus now, as I've presumably mentioned here in the past, with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
melting_candle and setofe and three others. It's pretty near to school, a lot cheaper than living on-campus, and better for throwing parties in. I don't have a bed frame, but I'm borrowing a mattress, and I've managed to acquire a chair and a desk from the bins at various points by finding opportunities in the shapes of cars. I still have a lot of old class books in the garage for lack of anywhere to put them in my room. It's a real house with a real address and real neighbors (some Reed, some not) and everything, and it's quite exciting and should hopefully last a while. At some point we'll start talking about who'll be living there next year, but that conversation hasn't happened yet, and in the meantimes we have meetings every other week and minutes are taken and posted on the fridge, because the kitchen is very much a coming-together spot in the house.
After IntroLing there was a forty-minute wait until Intro Greek. (To be fair, Intro Greek also met on Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays and was not preceded by Ling, but everything else was TuTh so I'm just talking about those days.) Unless I had printing to do or some other such errand, these forty minutes were generally spent priming myself for whatever that day's quiz would be on, because Greek had a short quiz every day. And talking to Jenny, but let's say that didn't happen much because most talking we did in that window was time she was supposed to be in class. Greek took a little while to get started at the beginning of the semester, because the teacher had swine flu, so we had a week or two with another professor teaching it (as well as one day with a student, which was a new experience at Reed and went absolutely horribly), but things settled down into a simple rhythm not too long after that. Unlike German, (Attic) Greek is a dead language, so there was no focus on conversation and little on speed of production, work was dedicated to comprehension and production of text with verbal performance a secondary concern. It has far more endings to deal with, meaning that the first semester is little more than morphology with syntax playing a bigger role in the second semester, but I think I did pretty well on the tests and exams, and again only missed one class, on the same day for the same reason. The five worst daily tests are dropped, anyway, so one of the dropped tests will just be a 0. So far Greek has come up a couple times, like I know that "Moira" means "fate" and I wrote "Have a happy day of the Jesus" (that being the best Greek translation I could come up with) on one of Nicola's christmas cards on the trip back to Santa Cruz for winter break, but I certainly don't expect any conversations in it.
At that point it was noon, and Tuesdays I was a lunch host for the school, alongside one of the other Greek students (a classics major) and a girl named Taya (anthro). Lunch hosting is my first successful foray into the world of Reed admissions... they wouldn't take me as a dorm host or tour guide, but as soon as I applied for a job that didn't pay anything (other than free lunch once a week), that was fine. Pssh. Anyhow, lunch hosting was a lot of fun and I definitely think I got better at it as the semester went on... basically, we'd go into the admissions office and be given one, two, four, five, some number of prospective students, high school juniors or seniors or what have you, and we would go to commons and chat about Reed for an hour. Some were definitely better fits for Reed than others... probably the most memorable incident was the two girls who later resurfaced hanging around the staircase to the GCC basement, so I took them to the fantasy dorm for a couple hours where they had a fabulous time and were given strawberry soda to drink and admired all the window art. The strangest kid was a small, bespectacled one from Texas or thereabouts who was worried that there weren't enough conservatives at Reed and wondered if he would get along with people if he came here. But hey, free lunch! Count me in.
Depending on if I felt like it or had homework to do or whatever, some days after lunch I'd go to Advanced Topics in Syntax, which I was auditing because it only had four real enrolled students in it and I had been told it was a fun time. It was definitely an interesting experience being in a class and not doing any of the homework for it, though I imagine there are some people who get away with that for classes they are signed up for, at least as far as reading goes if not turned-in assignments. It was a fun class, and I learned some things, and we were pretty social, as I guess befits an upper level class. I don't want to spend time exclusively with Ling majors by any means, but as time goes on I do seem to meet more of them, and they can be interesting people at times, I suppose. The teacher is new and Russian and is only so good at communicating with students, plus the subject matter was a bit complicated so there were numerous numerous silences, and I always felt a little odd about being the one to answer questions because I didn't want to get in the way of people being graded for their participation.
After that was Dialects of English. Well, sometimes... on at least five different occasions the DoE teacher sent out an email a few hours beforehand announcing that there wouldn't be class that day, which he would then spend some time the next class meeting explaining, and no recompensation for the lost value was ever given, but on average, after that was Dialects of English, my introduction to the Sociolinguistic side of the department, to be followed by Language and Society, the new official Reed introduction to the Sociolinguistic side of the department. Teehee. This class eventually descended into chaos, and we got through many half of the things we supposedly planned to (but then who knows, seeing as we never got a syllabus), but the first half of it (so the first academic quarter) was all right and we did get some interesting stuff to read. This class too had a lot of people I knew in it, but of the older set, juniors and seniors, at least for the most part. Girl-Sam snuck in too. The teacher is a visiting professor, and has been for some years, and his position is opening up to be permanent next year, and it's unclear whether he'll get it or if some outside applicant will. Should make for exciting classroom blogging, I guess.
Finishing up the school day was Directing I. I've already written here at great length about the first scene I directed for the class... I'm not going to go into nearly as much, or practically any, detail about the second, but suffice it to say that it did not go very well and I don't want to dwell on it. Costumes looked good, blocking mostly worked, but casting was faulty, sound cues were missed, lighting was iffy, and lines weren't memorized. When not focused on sets of scenes, the class had a lot of presentations on famous directors (their lives and philosophies) and discussion of the schedule. For two weeks we collaborated with a Choreography class in the dance department, which was largely a waste of time but hopefully amused some people. It was definitely a change of pace telling my peers what to do and having them usually go with it, and I enjoyed the class, though I don't really know how it's going to be graded.
I wasn't at Lane at all this semester, marking a radical departure from freshman and sophomore years. I was informed at the last minute that the musical theater program wasn't happening that semester, with money going to a band program instead, and while I poked a creative writing program/class/workshop/doohickey into existence, it didn't end up being compatible with my schedule. I applied for the position of LASER program coordinator, essentially the person who manages all the Lane interns and mentors from Reed and makes sure they're doing well and addresses all their problems and whatnot, but was ultimately unsuccessful. Now I just have to try not to resent the person who did get the job -- on the one hand, she's bad at answering emails, but on the other hand, she's very nice and apologetic about it.
Some of the time gained from doing neither Lane nor the Quest was put into a Bollywood-style dance that a Reed student was directing and choreographing. There were eight girls and four boys and we met to rehearse/learn new parts of the dance once or twice or thrice a week for most of the semester, until we finally performed it first at Reed's own Diwali festival, put on by the same student, and then twice at the Fall Dance Concert, which I am more accustomed to experiencing from the other side of the stage. I wasn't a very good dancer by any means, but I committed myself, and I think only failed to be punctual when necessary the once. Toward the end of the semester I put the dance music on a few times in the student lounge across from the bookstore when no one else was in there and practiced the moves, eliciting a few askance looks, but no one stopped to stare for minutes or anything epic like that. There are a few videos online but they either only cover part of the dance or do their best only to film the part of the stage that I'm not on. Us boys looked boring, but all the girls had amazing outfits which I (and they) coveted like whoa.
Another Reed department taking a very slight interest in me is academic support: I was recommended and subsequently trained to be an individual tutor for Introductory Syntax and Morphosyntactic Typology. The former has no prerequisites and will probably be taken by several people with little background or talent in the field, so that should be good next semester, but in general the only people who take MST are those who are already good at it and thus don't want my help, no matter how much time they spend talking to each other about the problem sets. Individual tutors meet with individual students for periods of one hour, generally, and I logged exactly one hour of tutoring work this semester for exactly one student, though I also got paid for attending a few training sessions. May work pick up in the future!
Speaking of that last word, I'm living off-campus now, as I've presumably mentioned here in the past, with
melting_candle and setofe and three others. It's pretty near to school, a lot cheaper than living on-campus, and better for throwing parties in. I don't have a bed frame, but I'm borrowing a mattress, and I've managed to acquire a chair and a desk from the bins at various points by finding opportunities in the shapes of cars. I still have a lot of old class books in the garage for lack of anywhere to put them in my room. It's a real house with a real address and real neighbors (some Reed, some not) and everything, and it's quite exciting and should hopefully last a while. At some point we'll start talking about who'll be living there next year, but that conversation hasn't happened yet, and in the meantimes we have meetings every other week and minutes are taken and posted on the fridge, because the kitchen is very much a coming-together spot in the house.