First day of class today! It went really well. 200a sounds like it’s going to be a really vigorous but thorough philosophical journey through early 20th century thought. I’ve spent all day (and all night…) busting through the first of the first half of the Saussure reading, but it’s going pretty well. I’m trying out a new reading technique whereby I take notes on a desktop wiki as I go. I have really high reading comprehension (or so standardized tests always tell me) but this stuff is just too thick and too plentiful to read straight like I did as an undergrad. Anyway, I definitely feel like I’m getting a lot out of it so far.
Only other thing to note today is that we got a kind of scary sounding email from the professor of the other class I’m signed up for – Theories of Second Language Acquisition – essentially telling us that it’s intended for people who either have a research project in mind or are already working on one, and that it might be best for the rest of us (read: the entire 1st year class, which all signed up) to take it next year. So I swapped out of that one and now I’m back in the class I was originally so excited to take: Variation in Speech Communities.
Sadly, this all happened after the first meeting of that class, but no matter. My best non-Lewis Ling buddy is in that class and we’ve agreed to an exchange of notes, and I’ve already gotten to look over the syllabus and handouts from today on the class website. The syllabus makes the class look really demanding… but I think I’m up for the challenge. It is, after all, the only other class I’ve got this quarter. And though 200a is reading-tastic, we only have one assignment for the whole year: a paper at the end of the term. I think I can handle the extra work from 260. Or at least, my fingers are crossed! One more beneficial thing to note from this class swap: I now TA exclusively on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and have “real” class exclusively on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This is good!