Course Verdicts

Child Law: excellent, interesting, useful
Lecturer: Mrs passionate & organised

Phil: not bad, often mind-stretching
Lecturer: alert, twitchy dwarf :)

Aboriginal Studies: tolerable - I did actually learn some stuff! a little bit
Lecturer: hardened cynic.. but not without reason

SWRK: blerg (more than less)


Goodbye 2nd yr of uni!!

Yeah, one of those cliched posts about student life!?

so we all know students are strange. but we also know they are entirely predictable.
[This is one of those time where the psychology people would say 'ah ha! see - there are two opposing statements - you must conduct a foolproof research study to discover which statement is actually true!'
And the anthropology people would say 'ah that's interesting, let's find out more about what these particular student people do, they sound interesting..'
The linguists might say 'it's interesting that she does not capitalise the first word of her piece, and how she begins her second sentence with a ... let's find out more about how people of her social group speak and write and put together a summary of their grammar and a lexicon.'
The historians might say 'what context is she writing from? do you think she has a bias? How valid is this account?'
The literary types might add 'and can you see how she expresses this? How does it compare with so & so's approach...']

Let's go with the anthropologists.

so.. these particular students have been known to:

-go to classes not their own, to pick up some 'free education'* [it's funny being mistaken for 'real' participants - I ask "what's the question again?" an outsider "ah, so I see you haven't started the essay either!" er, no, and I don't plan to..]

-go to class to avoid doing assignments (it's true!).

-some don't start essays until the wee hours of the night before, while others begin weeks in advance.

-the latter tend to be jealous of the former's laidback attitude, while the former envy the discipline and studiousness of the latter.

-if you go to bed early in a student house, odds are the others will all be staying up watching movies, studying, playing music, cooking, or just hanging rowdily.

-if you go to bed late, the odds are that the others will be waking early and setting off avalanches in the kitchen.

-you are likely to experience all sorts of interesting smells in bathroom and kitchen, and have opportunity to chart the progress of various moulds and mildews in both the above areas.

-you will always have company to whinge about lecturers, tutors, and assignments with. Except for those last hateful days or weeks or term when someone (or some many) have infuriatingly beaten you to the assessment finish line.

-you will become very familiar with the library, info commons, student hubs, and cafes - particularly around those fateful 'end times'. There will be the purposeful hum of activity (it smells like nervous sweat, overheated computers and coffee beans).

-you will never need to go far to find someone to procrastinate with/to, especially if you have wireless and a laptop (damn you facebook, blogger, myspace, MLIA etc!!)


This is the extent of my observation so far. I'll let you know if anything more comes up.

ps. And just for the record, although I would prefer to avoid cliche, it's difficult for a very good reason: it's usually cliched because it's true!


*this has even been known to happen with students who don't go to their own classes!

poetry class still rules...

So we took our poetry class to the pub.
We drank beer (most of us)
read poems (some of us)
talked about poets (many of us)
listened to the lecturer talking about poems
and poetry
and love-hate-family
and general possibly-related-but-probably-not-really stuff.

We plan to do so again sometime
[why not every time!!?]


The Six Strings

The guitar
makes dreams weep.
The sobs of lost
souls
escape through its round
mouth.
And like the tarantula
it weaves a large star
to trap the sighs
floating in its black
wooden cistern.

- Federico Garcia Lorca

Poetry class rulz ok?!

So, in "Poetry in Action", we engage in various actions or behaviours, as you might expect:

-hunting down exciting poetry, eyes and ears open, hands clawing and unclawing, teeth bared..
-reading exciting poetry
-arm-waving
-inventive pronunciation attempting
-space-staring
-listening to exciting poetry lecturer rave on.. [seat-wriggling, note-scribbling, head-scratching, eye-blinking etc]

(His other joblife is at the fish market. He loves fish. And fishing. He also loves poetry - any kind. He loves reading and writing it way more than writing his thesis - which is sad for his poor neglected thesis, but not for everyone else!)

One time we even got to write some. Some was about a tree.

Mountain Ash

tiny spark spears forth
from earth
pillars stripped back
in old sky.

crisp of sheen the
shining neck
towers gently,
beckons.

by unraked sea
in time of triumph
whisper softly
one leaf I stole.

and caught by curves
of echoed cliffs
trunk hallows fragments
of lost wind.