School's Out (Forever?)

OK, I'll admit to being a little slack on posting lately. I'll also admit that Bob Dylan is a little prolific in terms of song writing. Odds are good it's Andy's fault (for the first one, that is).

Anyway, school has finally wrapped up. It was a torturous final month of lectures, tutorials, papers, exams, and all varieties of academic drudgery. I thought, however, that I'd share a few things I noticed about Australian uni through the course of the semester.

At the beginning of the semester, I was unsure of what to expect. Having been a prisoner of the American education system for years, I think it's fair to say that I expected my new confines to be similar to the old ones, but with a new accent.

Classes here meet less often than they do Stateside. I only had to find my way to campus six times during the course of any given week. That was cool, especially as it gave me time to explore the rest of Australia. My response of "that rules!" was tempered, however, by the realization that more is expected of students outside of class. My reading assignments were generally longer than I would see in the States, and I was expected to understand them more thoroughly than I would have to in most of the classes I took back home. Ultimately, I didn't mind this too much, as it was a particularly good way to insure that teachers were not simply presenting textbook chapters in lecture, as they all expected we had read them.

Though they were more spread out, lectures were pretty similar to lectures back home. The professor talks. The students pretend to listen. My teachers did have Australian accents, though.

One difference I did notice is that the small lecture classes don't have a special seat set aside for the teacher. All of the chairs in these rooms are the same. Being in a rather whimsical mood when I noticed this, I thought it could be attributable to the Australian sense of egalitarianism. I considered for a moment and decided that it was more likely a budget decision.

One part of Australian classrooms was exactly the same as home: the clocks. The same sorry S.O.B. who got the contract to make clocks for American classrooms must have gotten the contract for Australian classrooms, too. I wonder if he enjoys the fact that every student in both nations looks at his clocks every day. I hope he's bothered that we all doubt their veracity on a daily basis.

But now I'm done staring at clocks, either in Australia or in America. This was my last semester. I figure that's worthy of mention. It's certainly been worthy of celebration over here. Lest you fear I learned nothing in college, I decided that I would take a moment to compare something I wrote long ago to part of the paper I just turned in.

Years ago, I wrote a story called "Shiva the Wonderdog." In it, our dog did some amazing things, but the key line that left me laughing when I shared it with a group was, "We laughed so hard that milk came out of our noses."

That's pretty easy to understand, and it has a gross-out factor, so it's a pretty tough sentence to beat.

Just last week, I put the following footnote in my paper for philosophy: "Essentially, the argument here is that gold, being an element, is necessarily an element because of its composition. If gold’s composition meets the criteria to be an element, then necessarily, it is an element. Gold’s composition meets the criteria to be an element, so, by modus ponens ,it is necessarily an element. The truth of the claim that gold’s composition meets the criteria to be an element is only knowable through empirical examination, but this does not change the fact that gold is an element by necessity a priori."

No points for understandability and certainly the only gross-out factor here is that there is probably a point in the slew of italics and funny phrases. I did use some big words and some Latin, though, so clearly I learned something in college.

I hope the improvement was worth $40,000.