Classes...

I must have been really good recently, because karma is paying me back in kind for a change! My schedule is the best; I have no classes before 11am, none after 3pm, Wednesdays and Fridays off and don’t start on Monday until 5pm! Booyah!

My classes, intellectually are less challenging than Birmingham (UK!) which is great, because I can finally keep up/ be ahead! American university is a lot like school: my tutors know my name and stop and talk to me, we get homework and they keep checks on your attendance (downside). Which again, is great, because I loved school and I thrived in that atmosphere. I’m hoping this year will inspire me to love education again and be a kick up my ass (‘ARSE’) for my 4th and final year.
Another perk is that they test you in small doses throughout the year. Which is definitely better because you don’t have to revise heavily for something you learnt in the first week and have blatantly forgotten by the time exams come round!

Without wanting to sound too much like an English snob, I do sound very intelligent and worldy compared to my fellow students. What I mean is, they are slightly dim. Let me give you an example of how dim:

X: “Wow, where are you from?”
Me: “Bedford, in England.”
X: “Awwwsome! So, did you have to learn English to come here?”
Me: “No. I’m from England. England…English…see the connection there?”
X: * blank face * “Yeah, cos you sound really fluent.”

BANG. That’s the sound of me shooting an imaginary gun in my head.

One of my classes is ‘Latinos in the South’ and it’s a service-based class, which means I get to go out and do some voluntary work that helps the Latino community in Tuscaloosa. I noticed, fairly quickly, that Latinos here are the lowest down the class scale…any construction work, cleaning work and other manual jobs are occupied by the Latino community, before school starts and after football game weekends, they send a bunch out to clean up the university campus. 200+ Latino workers file out like worker ants, then they disappear as quickly as they arrive and everything looks pretty again. It’s shocking. Some of the staff are protesting to have this stopped, thank Christ.

My other classes are pretty cool too, they’re discussion based and sometimes get a bit heated (like the Social Inequality class) which…I love! And the other two are literature modules, but I don’t have as many books to read as usual so all is good and well!