School's out for summer

And it hasn't come soon enough. These last three weeks have been torture on me mentally and physically. My body's craving for some good sleep.

I enjoyed all my courses but as usual some were more fun than others. My favorite course this time around was ENG225, American Literature which was taught by Mr. Norman Bates, an enthusiastic and compassionate instructor and lover of American literature. He made the class fun. The classmates were all very interesting to listen to (many had great imput to add) and the reading level was about right. I plan on reading more American literature in the next few months. The choices we had were all great.

My most disappointing course, oddly enough, was the Digital Photography. The instructor was quite knowledgeable in the field but he wasn't very personable and seemed more interested in chatting with the young women in class than helping everyone individually. This wasn't his fault because there were too many people signed up for the class. We had close to 30 students in the class and every computer was taken. He liked the professional students the most. He seldom came to my corner of the classroom, and I will admit my corner seat was not conducive to stopping by to look at my work.

He did like my portraits and micro photography. I'd like to hone in on both, but I never got the encouragement from him he gave others. In fact, he seemed rather kurt with me when I came into class that last day early for some assistance on how to convert images to web and he replied "You act like you never opened CS4 Bridge" when in fact I've been working on it for the past two months at the computer library and taught myself how to do initial work in that program. I don't pay an instructor a lot of money so that he can degrade me like that. I watched him mingle with other students who clearly had no idea what they were doing and he never used that kind of tone with them. He did apologize for being short with me, but I have to admit I never got talked to like that from any instructor, EVER.

All this means is that I'm not flocking to his next class, as much as I'd love to learn some more advanced techniques. I may be better off teaching myself CS4 over the summer, one lesson a week, or following an on-line free tutorial.

Both of my history courses were good, too. I enjoyed both instructors. And my Biology 114J class was more time consuming than I expected for a one-credit class. I got an email from the instructor tonight saying I made "Best Student" of the class. I was not expecting that, not with those low As I was getting on those frustrating multiple-choice exams. I did like the course and I did learn some interesting things about Arizona critters, but for a one-credit course I sure was putting in a lot of time into it. The on-line course always met Fridays at 6:30pm, which was a very inconvenient time for me.

But I pulled through. I don't have all my grades in but I hope I did as well as last time. I will never again take more than four classes per semester as long as I'm also working.

I'm already signed up for three courses this fall: Spanish 101, English 273 (Women in Literature) and History 241 Medieval era. UA-S is offering some wonderful US History courses this fall, but I need a historiography course first before I attempt upper-level classes.