First day of classes (part Ib)

Spring semester starts today, along with Barack's presidency. One is a significant, important, and exciting new beginning, the other is about as exhilarating as celery. I'll leave you to decide which is which.

In any case, I had two classes today, neither one longer than about 15 minutes, but it's not like I was counting the minutes or anything. The first was 3D, which was supposed to be with Kathryn Filla, who is filling in for Lenny Basich (sp?) who is teaching at the Bauhaus this semester. In any case, we all traipsed downstairs to see why there was a 'meet in the cafeteria' note on the board, and we were informed by our omniscient department head that no, our teacher was not Lenny. Duh. And that Filla was never slated to teach the class, because they were asked to cut down by one class, so Lenny cancelled his class since, y'know, he's in Germany. Except that it said on WebAdvisor that Filla was teaching, but no, she's not, because Lenny cancelled this class. So we all have Karen Stone, the other class which met during the same time, which I chose NOT to sign up for since I've had Karen for the past 3 semesters, and that's quite enough. Not that any of the above is important to anyone, including whoever updates webavisor, because why would we need to know what's going on? So, in any case, we went over the syllabus, which is the same as last semester except for a visit to the Knoll factory which I think is in PA, but which I am still invited to even if i switch out of her class because we didn't go last semester like Karen wanted to. All she could think about was Obama, so after about 15 minutes of trying to figure out what happened to the schedule, and handing out syllabi to her students, all but 3 of whom had had Karen already, she went to go watch the parade on the tv projection in Memorial Hall, and I went to go check my mail.

The one thing that did come out of all of this is that I switched my 3D class to one that meets tuesday mornings, taught by the same teacher as History of Design last semester. I've seen their stuff from last semester, and it was mostly found objects; cut up cleaning supplies and plastic containers, etc. but Sarah said this semester he wants to concentrate on the connection between product design and 3D, which is exactly what Karen says, so it sounds better. But lo, what is their homework this first week?? Yep, rectilinear shapes out of plasticine. Woot. And apparently they spent the class in the parking lot criticizing car tail lights. Hmm....

Sociology was another 10 minutes, again getting a syllabus and info about what we'll be learning, introducing ourselves to the other 4930213995734.08237 students in our fluorescently-lit classroom, and the other first-day-of-class requirements. Basically I learned (from Angeloh, who took it first semester) that this class is nearly no work except for two papers, one of which is 2 pages, and some reading, and our teacher is really skinny and talks very quietly. Maybe it'll be interesting, or maybe I'll stop doing the readings 3 weeks into the course.

Only time will tell.