Die erste Woche der Schule

The first week of school is coming to a close, and I have to say that overall I’m not overly excited, nor disappointed. I mean, granted I’ve pretty much had a six-month summer vacation, but I don’t find the impact of school to be that heavy this time around. It’s probably the commute.

You see, Vancouver has the design flaw that there’s no college or university in the east end. There’s VCC, but I don’t go there ‘cause their one and only English class can really become boring to an English major. No, I’ve had to commute ever since graduation. Thirty minutes to Douglas College, thirty minutes to Capilano College, forty-five minutes to UBC; and lord help you if you miss one of the many forms of transportation one has to take to get to any of these institutions. Then you might as well turn around, or kill time at a Subway until your next class (every higher education institution I’ve gone to has had either a Subway or a Quizno’s in it).

No, here I have a ten-minute commute, which includes waiting for the S-Bahn, and walking the block to any of my classrooms, which are all downtown. So it just feels like a visit to downtown. Coupled with the maximum time limit of the classes of an hour, and the fact that with the exception of two the classes only meet once a week definitely makes the experience different than in years previous.

As for the classes themselves: I have an English literature class (taught in English), which hopefully won’t mess with my German language flow. It’s called the American Dystopia, and in it we read dystopia novels, like: Jack London’s The Iron Heel; Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here; and a couple Kurt Vonnegut novels (which I’m psyched about). It’s gearing to be pretty cool, and pretty simple as I’ve put in two reading sessions towards the Jack London novel and I’m half finished already (or am I half unfinished?)

The resident director of the Canadian Year in Freiburg program teaches my next two classes so the only ones that can take the class are fellow Canadians in my program. They’re all right, though so far everything I’ve learned in these classes has been review. Hell, easy credits, right? Mmm… University. By the way, the classes are a Grammar course, and a German Literature course.

And finally I have a class that I’m quickly coming to regret taking, after only one class in which we just took a placement test. It’s called Schreiben im Studium, and it’s pretty much an academic writing course. Now, I could care less about academic writing, even after all this time in University; but I thought it would better my German. It still might, but at the moment it feels pretty dry. Maybe I have to give it more of a shot, but the placement test definitely cut me down to size. Out of the six questions on the sheet, I only answered about half of them, totaling to four sentences. The worst one was the question which stated (though I didn’t find out until later what it meant): “Describe your skill in writing German”, which I left blank.

Ah well… I’m sure I’ll be translating war movies in no time, it’s just frustrating at the moment, when you’ve been here for over a month, and the only thing German you’ve mastered is how to order food. So long as the waitress doesn’t talk back to you, in which case you’re screwed.

Tschüss.