Back to School!
I’m finally back in Evanston, where it is a surprisingly toasty 18 degrees. I moved into my apartment on saturday and started classes on monday. To start the quarter off, here is one or two interesting facts from each of my first classes.
Medieval Literature: Paganism and Christianity- The names for our days of the week come from germanic gods, and the french, italian, spanish, latin days of the week are named for equivalent roman gods.
Queer Cinema: In many parts of the world, being an out, active, social gay person is almost impossible without learning english.
Human Sexuality- This really doesn’t apply to humans, but the more mates males of a species have, the greater the size difference between males and females (ex: male elephant seals are huge compared to females, but lions who are more towards the middle of the spectrum are closer in size). Monogamous species are roughly the same size (ex: penguins).
Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury- We mostly went over the syllabus in this class, but I learned that grad students can take undergrad classes, John Maynard Keynes and Virginia Woolf were bffs, and there are business majors at northwestern who don’t know who Keynes is.
On a really nerdy note, I think it’s really exciting to get to the level in school where there are no more concrete answers and professors trust you to just kind of run wild. I don’t know what the opposite of patronizing is in this sense, but in my experience, that’s what Northwestern professors are. They are, for the most part completely brilliant and expect students to be equally brilliant, which is both great and intimidating at the same time, but mostly great.
