First Week

Well we made it, the house is still full of boxes and my office is a wreck but who's keeping score? The first week of classes was not that bad. I'm in two "introductory" classes that they have all their MA students take before they can take anything else and since the classes are designed to bring all the students to the same level we are starting out very very basic. One of the teachers (a PhD student) even commented in class that she's had people complain we are moving too fast and people complain we are moving too slow. She reminded them all that she is trying to teach the class so that by the end of the semester we are all on the same level and have learned something. It made me laugh. Last year I took a graduate syntax course at BYU and the exact same thing happend. Linguistics undergrads complained that the course was too slow and the TESOL / new to linguistics students felt the class was too hard. Anyway, I told a fellow student that we all just needed to be a little patient and in about a month we'll all be working pretty hard. I personally am enjoying not being frantic the first week of class.

I was riding the bus the other day and had a thought I'd like to share. Several times while we were traveling there were several people that would get on the bus, ask the driver if the bus was going to XYZ destination and then they would either pay their fare or they'd leave. The first time that it happened I thought to myself "who gets on bus and doesn't know where it's going?". Immediately after the thought I chuckled at myself and thought about how in life we are all on a journey and how there are so many ways people approach traveling through life. Some people don't ever think about where they are going and just sort of end up wherever life takes them. Others try to plan every detail and end up frustrated and depressed when life throws them curve balls. Still others try to keep the destination in mind and take what comes as it comes. I know where I lie on that spectrum and I must admit that I am trying to be a little more balanced in all I do.

The Boulder campus is really beautiful. All their buildings are this sandstone brick outside. Inside is another story ;). Each building is very unique on the inside, unique floor plan / style and even unique in how well the building has been kept. They apparently don't have legions of students on their custodial crews like BYU so some building's interiors are really dirty. Bathrooms are interesting and lets leave it at that.

While walking around on campus I came across a little monument to the Challenger astronauts, too bad for Pluto eh?

One of the buildings I have a class in