Back to School

Today was the first day of classes and I pretty much had all of mine today except for a hybrid class that meets once a week in person and another completely online class. I'm taking six classes this semester but auditing one of them so it's a decent courseload but shouldn't be too bad. Anyway here's a little rundown of what I had today.

I started the day off with accounting at 9:40. Not too bad, a lot different than the first accounting class I took last year since that one was an honors class so it was significantly smaller. Should be interesting to see how this class goes since I'm not used to having any labs for accounting or getting help from TAs instead of the professors. I'm not really a fan of the subject either, but I've heard a lot of people say this was easier than the first section so I guess we'll see.

For my first back to back of the day I had microeconomics right after the 15 minute passing period, but it was in the same room which made things less stressful and I was glad I didn't have to walk out in the heat. Honestly I didn't remember much. I've never liked economics either and kind of struggle with it so hopefully this isn't too bad. This one's also a big lecture class and the teacher spent the whole time going over the syllabus, which I figured I'd just read later so I had a nice little nap. She doesn't use powerpoint though so I don't expect to be able to count on this class to sleep in.

In between back to backs I have a little over an hour, so that was kind of nice. I don't know if it'll be enough time to bike back to my room (although it should be), but I just stayed in the main part of campus today and went to my next class a bit early.

At 12:55 was Latin 202, the class I'm auditing. It was pretty weird since the people in the class seemed to know each other from 101/102 whereas this is the first Latin course I'm taking at ASU. Also, I've only had one Latin teacher ever and she is one of the most well-respected high school Latin teachers in the country. Still, she's from West Virginia, so she had a kind of funky accent. It'll be an adjustment for sure to my new professor, who has a thick accent of her own since she's from Italy. But it's a good thing and she's clearly knowledgeable on the language and quite frankly, she sounds really cool when she speaks Latin with her Italian accent. It just flows so nicely off her tongue and sounds a lot more fluid and natural than the slight drawl and twang of my high school teacher. Should be a good refresher course in case I do decide to take more advanced language classes later. I just hope everything comes back to me quickly so I don't look like an idiot in a class where I've already learned the subject matter.

Right after that is Biblical Hebrew. I thought it sounded interesting, but I'm also taking it to fulfill some requirements for my religious studies minor. It's a pretty small class with about 15 of us, and it amazed me that more than half of us (maybe 8 or 9) professed to be Christians who were taking the class to get a better understanding of the text. That was pretty cool to hear and got me wondering if we might butt heads over the interpretation and translations of the text later in the class. But one thing I could already tell is I'm going to love the professor in that class. She's a youngish-looking (early-mid 30s?) PhD from the French side of Belgium and speaks what kind of sounded like French-accented British English. Her passion for the subject was readily apparent as was her passion for language in general (she knows French, Dutch, German, English, Greek, Latin and old Hebrew). One thing I've noticed as a student is that it's way easier to get excited about a subject if whoever's teaching you is excited about it. She's just so enthusiastic and funny (maybe without trying to be, you know how foreigners sometimes are) and that class looks like it'll be a nice way to end my Mondays and Wednesdays.

I kind of just noticed today that I've got two business classes back to back followed by two ancient languages taught by foreigners back to back. Hopefully it won't be too bad trying to switch gears from accounting to econ and then from Latin to Hebrew since those subjects may have some similarities but are largely different. We'll see how it goes, but I'm actually strangely looking forward to these classes now, which isn't anything I've said or thought in quite a while.