Francesca's First Classes

1. Modern World Revolutions
The professor is a NUTTER. He is seriously mad. He walked into the room at the start of class and made us chant revolutionary slogans: "Last Star On, First Star Off!" (No, I have no idea either.) He hinted that he had been shot in an anti-Vietnamese-war protest. He claims that the government once offered him a job 'destabilizing African democracies' - he said no as he felt that he wouldn't be able to sleep at night after a day of pouring poison down Muslim wells. He has given us a class song, which we apparently have to sing every class, and has offered more class credit to anyone who volunteers to sing the Marseillaise or the Russian revolutionary song in various languages. He quotes constantly from films and gets annoyed when no one knows of the film to which he is referring; he gives us signals to applaud him when he feels like he's made a particularly interesting point. However, he seems to know what he's talking about, and the class WAS fun. The assignments are crazy though, we have class twice a week and there is a compulsory assignment for each and every time we meet, otherwise we lose credit and can potentially go down a/several grade(s). He actually reminds me of Mr Mimmack (my IB History teacher), with the madness and the irreverence and the strictness and the in-depth subject knowledge. I'm looking forward to the rest of the course, actually! =)

2. Gender in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
My first impression of this class was a seriously bad one. The professor put up a projection of a fifteenth-century woodcut of Phyllis riding Aristotle, and asked the class why it had been printed. I had no idea, so I said nothing, and neither did anyone else. The answer was this: "Because they didn't have photography in the fifteenth century."

AAAARGH.

And this to a class of final-year History majors! This is one thing that really annoys me about the US - if you go on the history section of the HPU library website, they have a database of primary historical documents, which sounds fascinating, until you read that they go ALLLL the way back to... 1972. That's not history!

Anyway. The poor teacher had obviously expected a bit more class participation, because towards the end her voice was trembling and she let us out 20 minutes early. I went to talk to her about being unable to afford books and she was amazing! She lent me one of the books, and is going to photocopy (whoops - Xerox) the documents from the other one for me, which I'm going to go and pick up tomorrow after Representations of Pacific Life. We're also going to go to get our TB tests in the afternoon, otherwise the university here won't release our final grades to Essex and we'll fail university. Tomorrow I shall also speak to my parents (unless they simply don't call and then don't bother apologizing again =P), after our daily sunrise swim at Waikiki Beach... ah, I love being here.

Ooooh, our bank cards have all arrived, including the various letters for Tom from England! We have money! Yay!

And hopefully I shall get Tom to finally write in here about his class today.