I just finished up my first week of classes (yep, I'm all done on Wednesday! And with my schedule change, I should only have classes on Monday and Tuesday starting next week). Here in the UK you can only take a maximum of four classes and each class is broken up into two parts; a lecture and a seminar. The lecture is in a large lecture hall with around 75-200 people and the professor gives their generic 1 hour lecture with powerpoint and notes. There are usually 4 or more separate seminars offered for the lecture, where the class sizes are around 20-30 people and either the professor or another teacher leads. In the seminars professors discuss the information covered in the lecture in more depth, and it gives students an opportunity to get to know their professors better (which I really like). So I have four classes, but technically 8 because I have a lecture and a seminar for each. Each lecture and seminar is 1 hour a week and meets once a week (which I LOVE). Here are the classes I am taking (even though I am an education major I am taking my general electives and liberal studies, so I tried to choose classes that would not be offered in the United States and offered different viewpoints than American professors would offer me)
Britain & India-We are going to learn about the relationship between Britain and India between 1857-1947, which I believe is the period of constant British rule. I personally do not know too much about British colonization in India so I think this will be very interesting. I think I am most excited to learn about it from the British point of view.
Shakespearean Comedy-I wish my mom could take this class with me. I just know she would love it. I'm not sure if we are going to study all of Shakespeare's comedies or just a few, but I have to read Midsummer Night's Dream by next Tuesday so I have a feeling we will cover quite a few. In our first lecture our professor was discussing how we have no original manuscripts from Shakespeare because once he sold his play to a theatre company he had very little control over how his script was performed. I thought this was interesting! I have never taken a class simply on Shakespeare so I'm hoping that I will enjoy it!
Race and Slavery in the Atlantic World-We are going to be reading a lot of Slave Narratives, and studying slave trade from the 17th-19th Century. It seems that we are going to focus on the transatlantic slave trade, along with the economic and ideological rational behind slave labor. It may get a tad depressing, but interesting nonetheless!
The fourth class I was signed up for was called Orchestrating Europe and was going to cover the history of the European Union and how Great Britain was involved, but I attended the first lecture and felt that I was in way over my head. I would need more of a background on British history to understand a lot of the references that the professor was making. So I have dropped out of that class and I am hopefully going to be in Migration and Cultural Encounters. I really haven't read too much about it, but my flatmate is in the class and says it is very interesting!
The one thing that I do not like about the education over here is the grades. A 40% is passing, and people rarely (VERY RARELY) get 80%. Before I left NAU my advisor there told me that there is not the same 'need to succeed' in the UK-it is the norm for teachers to give 50 and 60 on assignments. I have heard it is normal to get 40% is most classes....which I am not okay with. I have a pretty nice GPA back home, and I don't want to mess it up here. I am hoping that I can talk to my teachers so I can get close to an 80 on my assignments. This is something I will have to get used to and try to work the system so I can keep my nice grades from back home!
That's all for now!
-G
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