New Classses

Hell hello! It’s been a while since I’ve posted a blog, but we just started our semester last week, so I’ve been inspired to write again. I’m really excited about all of my classes this semester; I’m taking Educational Psychology, Language and Culture, and Cultures of Sub-Saharan Africa. A typical course load here is 4 classes, so then for my fourth class I’m taking two “half” classes, if you will. I’m taking Physical Fitness this half of the semester, and then Yoga the second half of the semester. Ah, the perks of being a second-semester junior… I get to take Yoga! Yoga is a very popular class here, so usually by the time sophomores of freshman get to register, the juniors and seniors have filled up that class.

I’m an anthropology major, so I’m really excited about the Language and the Africa class. I’ve also been considering adding Education as a minor. I took one education class last semester and really loved it. I took the class as a test-run, to see if I actually would enjoy the department of education. We got to do service every week with kindergarteners at a local elementary school in Black Mountain and, well, those short-legged people were just so much fun, and they really taught me loads more than I think I taught them. That experience, that class, and the professor, all solidified my interest in the minor. Just this morning, actually, I went to meet with Pat Tuttle, one of the two education professors here, to get more information about the minor. And, turns out, I’m officially going to do it! I’m really excited to officially declare it as a minor and to delve into more education classes!

 

Even though I’m feeling really excited about all my classes, and even though my work crew is really great and really familiar, it is still taking me a little while to get back into the groove here. I spent the month of winter break at home back up in Pennsylvania. It was so wonderful and so relaxing and I ate so much great, home-cooked food. And let me tell you, I certainly was not preoccupied with reading academic journal articles, or with creating strong transitions in a paper. So getting back into the swing of things (as they say) here is definitely a little tricky for me. College is just such a different way of being than it was at home, so it just takes me a little to get used to it again. From my experience with past semesters, I suspect that by the end of the week, I’ll feel truly settled in J.

 

Before I close, I wanted to share an interesting conversation we had in my Language and Culture class this morning. We were talking about how language is used in jokes, and how when people joke, there are often multiple “texts,” multiple layers of meaning, happening all at once. One of my peers, we’ll call him John (why is it that arbitrary men are named John, and arbitrary women are named Jane?) told a story of a “joke” he experienced while sitting in the Morse Science Hall. Essentially, John’s peers were teasing him for liking classes that happen in Jensen Humanities building. I’ll let you all in on something… there’s a bit of a silent rivalry between students whose majors are in Jensen (the Humanities and Social Science building) and students whose majors are in Morse (the Science Hall). John’s peers were teasing him, telling him that there were easier classes in Jensen, that the Humanities students couldn’t possibly work nearly as hard. Of course, John, being a biology major and a Sociology/Anthropology minor, defended Jensen, saying those classes were just as valuable, etc.

 

It’s interesting to me, though, that this tendency exists, a tendency to compare and to “one-up,” even if it is in a joking way. In response, from my own prospective, from my Anthropology perspective, here’s what I think… there’s no denying that science students spend more time in class. They have longer lab class time, whereas humanities students have no labs. Nonetheless, both types of course content are equally challenging, just in different ways. In the sciences, most information is clearly laid out in a text book. Most homework is writing up lab reports, maybe reading text book chapters, and running complex equations and math problems. They deal with lots of challenging content, and lots of abstract “in the clouds” ideas. In the humanities, rather, at least from my experience, we do much more reading… reading, reading, reading. But it’s very evaluative, very analytical. We have to have our critical eye all the way on. We, of course, write lots of papers and such as well. Of course, I don’t have a solid grasp on the types of work that science students do because I am not one of them. Regardless, there isn’t (or there shouldn’t be) any higher value placed on one kind of work, or one major, over another.

 

The thing to remember is this: we all learn differently, and we all like to learn different things. We all retain different bits of information, and different kinds of information. My mind works better in the humanities, and I find it more interesting. The other thing is, and a beauty of Warren Wilson is, that if you major in chemistry or environmental studies or what-have-you, you’re not limiting yourself to just that discipline. I might even be so bold to say it’s impossible to limit yourself to one discipline here. Here at WWC, you really can learn from many different disciplines, and dapple in many different areas. And there’s certainly no denying that they’re all connected. I love this part about Warren Wilson.

Thanks for reading! And certainly, if you’re interested to know more, feel free to contact us, to give us a call or an email or even to come for a visit. We’d love to hear from you!

Hannah