Thanks to the scheduling system here at Mills (which is exactly the same in this respect to that of my high school), or semester starts with a three day week (beginning on a Wednesday), followed by a four day week (because of Labor Day) and then, after we've warmed up our studying muscles, we get a five day week. Since we started on a Wednesday and today is Wednesday, I have had all of my classes more than once so far and feel a bit more like I'm in the semester. In fact, I feel quite assimilated into student life. I'm chilling in the first floor computer lab while waiting to move my laundry over in the room down the hall. How much more student-y can you get?
I wanted to check in once again. I think the culture shock is wearing off a bit and the student workload shock cycle is going to do the same, though since it started after the culture shock one, it'll end a bit later. I'm at the point now where I got everything done for that first week and have turned it all in -- and all of a sudden, it's time to do it all again! It's like a treadmill. A treadmill of libraries, papers, pens, professors and tantalizing free time you could use for studying.
But I'm not whining. This is what I do, isn't it? At the age of 21, I have spent more than three quarters of my life in school. Yes, I went to school in exotic places and in between there were summer vacations, but essentially, all I have ever done is be a student. And the adult world never tires of telling the youth that these are the best years of our lives, so I'm ready to enjoy my senior year. Even with the homework.
It was without a doubt a fantastic decision to not take the computer science class. I am now thrilled to have wound up in both Stylistic History of Cinema and Film Music in the same semester. Coincidences are amazing things. Yesterday, in contrast to the first day of music class, yesterday we watched clips from a few movies (M, The Passenger, Carrie, Forever Amber) and had to identify just what the music did for the movie in those scenes. Was it "just" background noise, was it advancing the plot, was it mimicking the plot, etc. Then, in the evening, I had my History of Cinema class - last week, when I had the class, we only watched a film and since the first class wasn't required, the professor didn't talk to us much. He saved his introduction to the course for last night.
OH. MY. GOODNESS. A very dorky part of my brain is in love with this professor's way of thinking, talking, and being. To give you a picture, he's a man in his (probably) mid-sixties who ALWAYS wears tight blue jeans, hawaiian button-down shirts, cowboy boots and (a new development this year) has shoulder-length wavy silvery hair. As we affectionately call it, Jesus hair. He has been teaching for at least 35 years at various different colleges and my class will be the last one he ever teaches. He's going into retirement and has revamped one of his previously lower-division classes (for those of you who don't know, that means it's a class intended to be okay for first-years to take, though it's not restricted to first years) as an upper-division one. That's our class.
Two nights a week, we have a three hour class with this man. The class is 9 people. And he's just fine with that. He has a hilarious way of talking that is hard to convey if you've never heard it. It's sort of that he wants to convey a piece of information but doesn't feel satisfied unless he gives you every detail about it, even if that means that a 5-minute explanation takes twenty. He is telling us about a film that a certain director directed which was done after that director's most successful film - which incidentally was called XXX and produced in the year YYY and made famous the actress ZZZ for her role as QQQ. Etc. Hilarious. He also says things like "With my hearing problems ((he's exaggerating), memory problems and... and just general dementia, this is gonna be a fun semester." He also says it all with a Texan accent.
But this all is just making him sound like a strange old man from Texas who can't seem to stay on topic, but that's only a small fraction of his character. The thing that is so endearing is how much he does for his students. He has made available to us the syllabus from each of the courses he has taught here along with his lecture notes from all of them. Every film we watch in class is available in the library but just in case it happens to be checked out of the library, he has them all in his office and we can borrow them from him. We all get a hard-copy of his lecture notes, exam review sheets, and other articles that he's written or collected about the films we're going to see -- all bound together in book form, something that would normally cost at least 30-50 $ (I know, having worked in a college bookstore) and he gets it all compiled and printed and bound himself and delivers it to us personally for free.
Add on top of all of that the fact that he is delivering information about film to us students that we've never heard before - understanding how the complex machinery came around, the debate about whether or not film would every BE art, --- and he says those fantastic things that you hear in your life that are SO obvious but you have NEVER thought about them. For example, no other art form is so intrinsically tied to technology. No other art form forces artists to be so collaborative (you can't be a master actor, director, producer, choreographer, screenwriter, cameraman, editor, sound mixer, composer, and movie theater owner). And, since it was not considered to be something worth saving or something that would ever really be art, 90% of all films that were made around the world before 1950 are gone. You sit in his classroom and hear his passion as he talks about films, and all of a sudden, you want to simultaneously and immediately adopt him as a grandfather, sleep with your course reader under your pillow, and study film for the rest of your life.
There are few professors who can do that in one lecture. To be fair, it did take him three hours, but man, I had fun. With that, I think I'll go move my laundry to the dryer!
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