It's Learnin' Time

Alex's first week of classes.

One of the buildings I'm taking classes in.

Monday, March 5, 2007

So my first week of classes is over.  Besides this past week, I haven’t been through a single formal learning experience since the middle of December, so as you can imagine it’s taken a while to get back into the swing of things.  Luckily for me, the first week of classes are pretty much the same as back home, where professors pretty much go over the syllabus and then let the students leave class 30 minutes early.  But that’s just for this first week.

Before I go on describing my courses and professors, let me add this little tidbit about my health situation.  Remember that cold I got from the plane ride about 3 weeks ago?  It’s turned into that bronchitis I got 7 days ago.  But of course I didn’t realize it was that serious until yesterday, when one of my lungs popped out of my body.  Not a pretty sight.

So besides being sick all of last week, I still made it to classes and got a taste of my curriculum for the next few months.  I know the course list seems a little, well, homogenous, but all of these classes compliment each other and are important to my Anthropology degree.

Class 1: Maori Society.  This class is by far the largest I have ever taken in my college career. I’m in an auditorium with 200 other American students who are looking for a class they can’t get back home.  Seriously though, it would be a long day if I had to find a Kiwi who had signed up for Maori Society.  It just isn’t a class that New Zealanders are interested in for some reason.  From the course outline it seems like just what you would expect: a background in Maori culture.

Class 2: Introduction to Maori Language.  This class is also what you would expect, and is based on the idea that the students taking it know exactly nothing about the Maori language.  Luckily for me, that’s about where I am.  So far the class has gone over the proper pronunciation of Maori vowels and consonants, which have already helped me in the readings for Maori Society. Thankfully this class is a normal size for a language course- about 30-40 students.  Besides meeting for lecture twice a week, I’m expected to meet in a smaller discussion-based class once a week with about 10 people and the professor.

Class 3: Maori Performance.  One of my more fun classes.  Over the next months I will learn Maori folksongs, dances, rituals, and hakas, with about 40 other students.  Again, most of my classmates are American exchange students, but the professors are actually grad students of Maori descent who have been doing these performances their whole lives.  Who better to learn from, huh?

Class 4: Archaeology of the Pacific.  This is an Anthropology class which focuses on the physical evidence of the Polynesian travellers who colonized almost every island in the pacific between 10,000 to 40,000 years ago.  I figured this course would give me a little historical background beyond even the written history of New Zealand. I’ve also never taken an archaeology class before, so I’m pretty excited to see how this one turns out.

So those are my classes.  This is a course list I would probably never see in the states, and that is exactly what I was looking for when I came to Dunedin. 

Oh yeah, and the best part about all of this?  No classes on Friday.  Could I have done any better?