First Impressions

So, Tuesdays and Thursdays are my light days- my only serious commitment is Intro to Linguistics for two hours every morning. However, Wednesdays and Fridays more than make up for the lack of multiple classes on those days.
When I last wrote, I was heading to my Intro to Global Issues. So far, it's my most challenging class, but it's still interesting and I know I'll learn a lot (plus it's necessary for my degree) and thus I like it. Still, it was the only class to assign 35 pages of reading, plus a two page essay and a presentation on the first day which was due two days later. (Got it all done, too!)
My linguistics class (Tuesday) looks like it's going to be a lot of fun; difficult, but interesting and wonderful. It's important for me to find out if this is really what I want to study, so I'll probably be writing quite often about it.
But this morning my new class was Cultural Anthropology. At eight in the morning. Can you imagine how I feel about having eight o'clock classes four days a week? (CA and InLing both...) Not so very awake or thrilled. Then Dr. Arensen walked in. He's a large, rather imposing (if I were a few years younger, he'd be absolutely frightening) man who didn't seem to be the smiling sort. The whole class looked like we were about to die if he called our names. He began talking and within thirty seconds, I fell in love with the class. He's the nicest professor so far, told us all about practical cultural anthropology, explained that textbooks can't actually really teach you anything because you have to just read books and live it to learn it. It's more relaxed and studentcentric than any of my other classes. It's now my favourite class for the semester.
Oh, and I wasn't tired at all. I was practically vibrating throughout the two hour period. The rest of the day went fairly well, but nothing has topped it yet.

And I'll end with a few things that he said which I madly scribbled into the margins of my notebook.
"Everyone knows a lot about something."
"Learn not because you have tests or it's demanded. Learn because you want to learn it."
"Learn from people - not just paper."
- J. Arensen