• ART 115 (Art History II)- Everything seems to be OK. We are doing an introduction assignment at the moment, I have to pick an artist that has a K at the beginning of their last name to discuss, and I’m still working on that. This evening our syllabus was recalled (to be reissued Monday), because the bookstore and the instructor didn’t agree on text, and now everyone has the wrong text, and the instructor is going to adapt the course to what we have.
• ART 281 (Sculpture I) – REALLY PERKY Instructor. We will be working on making our own personal staffs, or at the very least the head of a staff and its stand. I have no idea what objects represent me, so I’m having a hard time with this project so far, but a sketch is due Monday.
• ART 288C (Ceramics Studio) – Same PERKY instructor as Sculpture. There is a similar project for this course, it is a personal totem, or micro-garden totem… whatever that means. The instructor and I have discussed how I want to work with the course. Because I have had no formal handbuilding instruction, the instructor wishes for me to work at the same pace ask her ceramics 1 (handbuilding) course until I am ready to break off and do my own thing. I think she wants me to get a feel for the studio. On Monday we will be making CLAY!
• CSC 153 (C# Programming) – I have completed the first two assignments, and will likely work through some of the others this weekend. The course is self-paced, so I will mostly use it to fill gaps between the other courses. The instructor is a complete nerd which makes the course even more of a fun event.
• ENG 131 (Literature) – This course is being taught by Wiki. I don’t know how I feel about this, but I think it could be interesting. Our first assignment is pretty much to read the first part of one of the books for the course, and be prepared to talk about it. We aren’t doing much yet. This instructor likes to do a lot of integrating of multimedia, so I will have to storyboard an idea for a short (60 second) film about the book we are reading and things like that. There was also something about selecting music to put behind Robert Frost poems and such. Nothing really accomplished in the course yet, but it is promising.
• HIS 131 (American History I) – So far it is dry and boring. It has mostly been reading so far except for the instructor’s video introduction. The instructor plans to use video and podcasts to teach the course in addition to the text, so this may be very interesting. The course structure looks to be laid in such a way that it will be a very interactive course. There are a lot of papers in the course, but it doesn’t seem like it will be something that will totally destroy me like my high school AH course did. I have completed my "orientation quiz" as well as submitted my paper introducing my goals for the course. Nothing else is due and the course structure isn’t really apparent as far as assignments, so I may just have to pick out some key words and get to reading and just kind of go with what I can at first until I get a grasp on what will be expected on the quizzes. I suspect the textbook website may be of some help for the preparations though.

I thought 6 courses would be a lot to deal with, but so far I can summarize them all and look back up at the summaries and ask myself "Is that all?". This might turn out to be a very fun and productive semester. None of my instructors seem to be too normal about anything, with the exception of maybe Art History, and well.. that’s just the way that things go sometimes. I’ll sweat through it and be glad every day of the course that my instructor is not Dr. James Frakes.