danajohnhill.org | Hard Times Come Again No More

Summer school is fast-paced. My ethics class began July 5, and already we are taking our mid-term exam. We will meet only twelve times this semester, so, in order to fit in a complete term’s worth of work, the assignments really pile on quickly. For instance, this weekend, rather than go together with Miriam to see her parents on the occasion of her father’s 70th birthday, I am staying home and writing essays and taking tests.

But I enjoy the course a great deal. My instructor, Dr. Smillov, is an amiable fellow from Bulgaria, who speaks flawless English with a thick, humorous accent, made all the funnier by his witty observations of the peculiarities of American culture, or lack thereof. I enjoy his lectures a great deal, and, it would seem, so does the rest of the class, since there is considerable group participation. The only drawback is that since we spend the bulk of our six hours together each week pondering moral dilemmas, we are obliged to do a goodly amount of reading on our own to be prepared for exams.

But the inverse would be worse. In fact, what I found so unappealing about my otherwise fine film class last semester was the way that watching a full-length movie every week consumed more than half our classroom hours. It would have, I felt, been more productive to use all our class time on lecture, and allow it to fall on ourselves to watch the assigned pictures on our own time.

So, this is how I am at home doing school work on a Saturday night.

Filed under: School on July 21st, 2007