"What you'll learn, I'm not entirely sure"

Perhaps it's because I've been out of class for more than 2 months now, but I was very abnormally excited for class to begin today. We've heard so much about the UK teaching system and were very interested to see how it works (we still don't get it). In any case, I could hardly wait to go to my first lecture today: Culture and Society of Modern Scotland!

Nicole very much enjoyed her 10:00 lecture on Scottish Fiction and was (un)pleasantly surprised to realize she has a 600-page novel to read by Monday. I fiddled around all day until my 2:00 class and then took the laborious 2-minute walk to Kennedy Hall (which, like our room, overlooks the sea) for my very first Scottish educational experience. I was excited to learn that my professor is a native Scot with an accent I can (kind of) understand. Now, neither of us know our professors names because they neglected to mention that small fact in our classes, and we have at least 4 lecturers listed per class.

Anyway, my seemingly nameless professor introduced the ideas of the class and seemed very enthusiastic about getting started. The course has been under fire for some years because it's apparently so interdisciplinary that it hardly belongs in the English department...we'll be discussing components of Scottish culture such as art, music, history, and news beyond the obvious literary aspects. Today we learned about Kailyard, an early type of Scottish literature that involved sentimentalism for the rural, hard-working, honest folk of Scotland's highlands. A different professor than the one who introduced the class lectured on this topic for nearly 2 hours, giving us a good overview of the topic. I hate to say that it's very unsettling and almost disappointing that I won't go to this class again until next Monday! Who am I becoming?!

The first professor said right before he left the room that he's looking forward to the course but..."What you'll learn, I'm not entirely sure." It's certainly an interesting outlook for a professor. Color me curious.

Now we're scurrying around to purchase our many, many novels for the semester and looking ahead to Wednesday's classes. After all, that will be our last day of class for the week...like I said, this system is still very foreign to us.

Academic updates to come!

Claire