Yay, this is my five hundredth post, and I guess I might not be shutting the ol' journal down so soon after all. Part of my motivation is that I want to make a new template for it - a good-looking one. I need to learn me some CSS. Anyway, that's going to happen after I finish this programming project I've taken up for Student Initiated Courses, which is going well and should be completed some time next week. It's been a good learning experience and I've become reacquainted with PHP and CSS and it's an opportunity to earn some money, though I don't know yet how much exactly they're going to pay me.
OK, first day of classes was today! Chinese, which was very amusing as usual, went well and it looks like we're in for a good deal of work this quarter as usual. Thanks to the goodness of the teacher, I did get an A+ for last quarter which made me really, really happy. However, I did more poorly in two other courses than I really was expecting and that was disappointing. But I guess a B+ over a B is not nearly as happy as an A+ over an A, so I take my result with happiness and joy! Next class was our Arabic class. I've switched sections now so that I have three Arabic classes a week instead of five although two of them are twice as long, but I think it'll work out better as, as a result, no Arabic tomorrow! Arabic is an extremely interesting language, possibly moreso than Chinese, but the way it's taught leaves something to be desired and I do truly wish their course planning was better, but what can I do... although, when I was watching a little bit of Al-Jazeera TV in Arabic I actually understood a couple of phrases, which caught me by surprise because in all the listening material we have for Arabic, everyone's speaking so fast (or so colloquially) that we cannot understand a word they're saying and I never expected to be able to understand anything on TV at this stage.
Next was the Chinese Calligraphy class that I thought might be interesting, and interesting it was. Taught by this eccentric old Chinese man whose English is actually quite bad, we had quite an interesting class today. It was almost as if it was out of a movie. I can't exactly relate the experience here, but it was extremely fun and amusing. Perhaps, imagine the kind of dialogue that Snape gave in the Philosopher's Stone in their first Potions lesson.
But the guy's a bit weird. He can't take more than 15 people in his class and there were 18 there, so he said he'd pick the 15 he'd keep by going down alphabetically by last name and picking the first 15. Aside from being quite rude (as, to the left-out three, he just said, "You can leave now"), this is wholly unfair and is just as bad as discriminating on any other factors (I'll take all the Asian kids first, then the White kids...) and there's definitely a better way of doing this. Since there are two sections, back to back, he should have at least asked if any of the people could transfer to the other section to balance the sections out or at least have waited until next class to see if anyone left, but no, he just told three people to get out of the class based on their last names. This is not done. Sigh...
The last class of the day was a class on Cocoa Programming which I am very glad to be auditing (because I just don't have any more units - I'm already taking 24 units for 20). It looks interesting. We've got our first (and very simple) programming assignment and I can't wait to get started.
Labels: English
