Noel: First day of school, Spring 2010

Started today off at the gym again- I've missed it, surprisingly. Since I haven't worked out since mid-November, I just did 30-40 minutes of cardio and lots of stretching.

0900-0950
Drugs, Behavior, and Society
Professor is very nice, very down-to-earth.
Has been going on for 10 minutes now about the student email system, though... but at least he's fairly funny :)
We're going to be covering a lot of material really quickly, though.
Overall, I think I'm going to enjoy this class.

1000-1050
Interpersonal Psychology
Instructor is a small woman, quiet-ish. I bet she's formidable.
She passed out small sheets asking for information about us: name, year, hobbies, movies, etc but with a couple of surprising ones: What cultures are you most familiar with? With whom do you currently have the most emotionally intimate relationship? Interesting....
She expects a lot of participation in class, and flat-out said that some of the things we'll work on will be triggering for some of us.

Lunch with Chris!

1200-1250
Gender and Power
I'm definitely going to like this class. The professor is really nice, and did her ethnographic research in St Petersburg- awesome!
Lots and lots of reading ahead, there are 5 books for this class and 1 really long paper. I probably want to decide here very soon what that will be on, because it's definitely going to be some real work.

1330-1445
Cross-Cultural Psychology
This course is going to be easy, but annoy me. The instructor is Korean and has a really annoying tendency to lilt the ends of her words so that every one of them sounds like a question. She's super anal-retentive as well, so I'm going to see if there's another 3-4000 level Psych course that's open in the same time slot. That said, the assignments are 4 simple 2-page papers.

Update: I dropped Cross-Cultural Psychology and am now taking Sexuality and Society.

1500-1615
Queer Identities
Dr Cavalier is a newly minted PhD, and very androgynous.
She flat-out said that she likes to give A's and doesn't test, but does require a lot of writing. That's not really a problem for me, though.
The good news is, she's a little sick and letting us out as soon as we're done with the syllabus :)
.........but what really amuses me is that apparently a lot of people sign up for this class and don't realize that it's heavily focused toward gays and lesbians. Um, really?

Overall, looks like a good line-up and lots of reading.