A New Semester

Friends keep asking me when my classes start and seem surprised when I reply, "Last Monday." Tomorrow begins my 2nd week with my first test and a quiz in my other 2 classes. Nothing like starting off with a bang. Here's the briefing on each my classes.

Abnormal Psychology: I have the same professor as I had for General Psychology last fall. We will be studying all the mental illnesses/disorders, the causes and how they are treated. This will be my "easy" class though we do have a test every 2 weeks. The advantage is that each test only covers 2 chapters worth of material and there is no cumulative final. It looks like there are enough people in the class that like to talk that we will have some interesting discussions.

Anatomy: Everyone I've talked to who has taken this class says it is all memorization. After the 1st lab and lecture I decided the challenge will be learning how to most efficiently study. My lab instructor said he was going to be a bear with us until each of us figures out the best way to learn the material. My lecture professor promised that it would be enjoyable and as long as we keep up, we'll be fine. The scary part is that spelling counts and the official names of bones, muscles, nerves... are rarely short. Yesterday I went on a bike ride with a group of people who turned out to all work in the medical profession and they told me about their experiences in Anatomy class - especially dissecting human cadavers. That isn't part of the program this time around. We'll do a cow eye, sheep brain and heart and a fetal pig.

Statistics: The professor of this class worked for umpteen years as a statistician for the NCAA. She declared that was a great job and is trying to inspire us to love statistics so much that we'll want to do it for a living. At the very least she wants us to be able to tell if the news is correctly reporting the results of a study or poll. The downside of this class is that all homework is done online. So far it hasn't taken too long so hopefully this will be a better experience than my online math class.