Expanding my mind

Ugh. I’ve still failed to upload the new color scheme, link you to my fest gallery, create my ’05 fest section, OR finish and upload a couple of early-to-mid August blog entries. I am the suckiest of all sucky human beings on the planet.

On the upside, fall semester hath started, and I’m already waist-deep in shit.

Anyone who thinks online classes are easy is a fool. A damn dirty fool. This semester is host to the fourth online class I’ve ever taken, and after only three weeks, I’m already getting a firm asswhoopin’. And my two in-person classes are no picnic either. Here I thought I was going into a fun, easy semester of just learning and rounding out an already well-rounded liberal arts education. HA! HA HA! I’m about ready to start cackling like the dude in “Feel Good, Inc.”

This time ’round, I’ve taken Physical Geology Lecture online. Not a good thing. Not by any stretch of the imagination. It’s so much harder than when I originally took it twelve years ago in person. There’s just something you completely lose in the translation when you go from having a real flesh-n-blood human being in front of you talking about the finer points of rocks and plate techtonics to reading lecture notes and pseudo-PowerPoint presentations on a website. I think it’s a pacing issue more than anything else. You don’t have that pause-and-reflect thing going on, where the professor brings up a point and then expounds on it with sidebars and correllations. Online, you’re expected to expound and correllate all by yourself, all on your own. Shit, I can’t even expound and correllate the stuff I know, let alone stuff I’m learning semi-brand new.

First test of the semester has already come and gone, and I’m sitting comfortably at a 73%. In my defense, I was lulled into a sense of preparedness after acing the first two chapter quizzes. I thought “Holy cow, do I know rocks or what?!” Yeah. Or what is right. On the plus side, teacher is a cutie, in that “I’m a science geek and I love rocks” sort of way. (He put his photo at the top of the class syllabus, that’s how I know) So at least I know it’s not some stodgy old bastard sitting behind a Mac somewhere, laughing his ass off at me and finding additional reasons to lower my grade for being a complete dumbass.

Geology Lab is at least promising though. That one was allegedly a hybrid class (half-online, half-in-lab) but upon arriving at school the first night, we were informed that the class wasn’t really online, and instead of the seventy-five minutes a week we had been expecting, we were actually going to be there for three hours a week. So Kevin and I had to grapple with the whole concept of being in class until TEN P.M. I’ve had classes before that have been billed as running until ten or ten-thirty…but you know how it goes…the teacher offers to let you go 20-30 minutes early in exchange for part of your mid-class break time. Not this guy. No siree. Marlon, as he likes to be called, kept us the first night until three minutes to ten. I thought I was going to die. Having been up since four that morning, I was not prepared for such horrors. On the up-side, now that we’re into doing actual lab work, he doesn’t care what time we leave, as long as we have all our labs completed and ready for grading by the time midterms roll around. God bless.

Creative writing…now that’s the class I thought was going to be fairly unintimidating. Instead, I find myself totally mortified by the idea of having people read and critique my writing. While I’ve spent most of my life writing actual stories…the kind of the fictional variety…I was formally educated as a journalist. I was taught how to deliver the facts in a straightforward manner, not allowing too much creativity or personality show through. And I was perfectly fine with putting that writing out there for people to see on a weekly basis. Having a whole campus pouring over my editorial on voting or my review of Interview With the Vampire wasn’t daunting in the least bit. I didn’t care what anyone thought of my writing because I knew damn well that none but a tiny sliver of the school population could do better.

Now that I’m actually expected to tell well-crafted tales and allow my classmates and professor to pick them apart until there’s nothing but a few commas and verbs left, I find it extremely difficult to turn out anything that doesn’t make me squeamish to turn it in. Our first writing assignment was for the professor only, and I was fairly OK with it when I turned it in…and then I reread it the next day while moving files around on my computer, and I just wanted to cry. It was so awful by mature writing standards, as far as I was concerned. I felt like I was reading something I’d written in junior high. I was embarrassed to no end.

So you can imagine my utter delight when he handed the stories back this week and he had a very kind and wonderful note about how I did a great job of closing the story and he looked forward to seeing more from me. I am not sure if he was just being nice, but I’d like to think I did something right somewhere.

I was the first guinea pig for the critiquing this week. We were asked to write a short piece of non-fiction based on one of several scenarios he gave us to choose from. I chose to write about the Stop-n-Pray, hoping my use of the word fucking wasn’t going to offend anyone’s delicate sensibilities. And also hoping I wasn’t going to come off like a total arse. I just never find my writing to be anything more than fodder for teenagers, you know?

The critique itself was excruciating at first. The author being critiqued isn’t allowed to say a single word. No explanation of the piece, no defending, no arguing…nothing. So I had to sit there in dead silence for twenty minutes while everyone gave their feedback. I kept waiting for the brutal beating to begin, but it never started. I got a lot of positive reactions to my story, and people were so enamored with the “punchline” and my use of the word fucking that I couldn’t stop giggling every time they referred to the line. I also got some great constructive criticism, and I took it like a champ because it was nothing but helpful. You can tell people want to honestly help you improve, but don’t want to discourage you. I think this class is going to get along really well. The teacher, Mr. Michels, is just amazing in his ability to deliver his praise and his criticism without ever making you feel like you’re doing anything wrong. It’s the kind of environment that every budding writer should be nurtured in. Harsh reality can set in later down the road…for now it’s nice to have the leg-up.

Looking forward to more of my classes. I spent my lunch hour today researching mineral specimens online to see if I properly identified stuff in lab last night. It’s been eons since I’ve been so stoked about minerals. I feel like a geek times a thousand. Tomorrow after grocery shopping, I plan to sit down and bang out my next writing assignment with not a smidge of dread. Maybe if I get confident enough, I’ll start putting some of this stuff on my site. Dunno. We’ll see.

At any rate, it’s good to be back in school and whizzing swiftly towards the end of the year. Please don’t mention how many shopping days until Christmas, though. I’m not whizzing that swiftly.