My Second First Day

I finally started class today. I woke up at around 8:00 AM today to the chill of the rain (my roommate left the window open), because I wanted to get to my class early so I could meet everyone and it takes almost 15 minutes to get there. I brushed my teeth and got ready, then headed downstairs to fill up my water bottle with cereal for later since I don’t really like eating right after I wake up. It kind of took a while to figure out how exactly I was going to get the cereal into the narrow mouth of my bottle. I ended up using a cup to transfer the cereal from the dispenser to my bottle, but this led the people around me to think that there weren’t any bowls yet, so there ended up being a lot of people walking around with cereal in their cups.

Water bottle filled with cereal, and backpack loaded with books, I headed over to my class. There are literally no turns from the dorm to the Psych building, and it’s relatively far, so the walk was pretty boring. To be fair, if it were a little more complicated, I probably would have gotten lost, so I guess I can’t really complain. For some reason, I didn’t see anyone on my way there. Maybe they were all eating or something.

Once I got to the building, finding the class was easy since it was on the first floor. When I walked in, it was just after 9 AM, but there were already 4 or 5 people sitting down who had started to introduce themselves. The first thing that struck me was that I had never seen any of them before (not that that’s a bad thing). Most of the people I’ve talked to so far are in either American Law or neuroscience, so it was good to finally meet the people in my class.

Our professor, Katherine O’Doherty (she told us to call her Kate) walked in right before 9:30 AM, and it turned out that I had chosen one of two seats closest to her. The room is arranged in such a way that there is a long table down the middle of the room, with chairs on either side. It had completely slipped my mind that there would probably be a seat for the professor, too, so I had just casually chosen one of the seats near the head without knowing what I was doing. It was a fortunate turn of events, though, because the class is mostly participation-based, and this way my hand can be seen right away.

The class session itself was fairly introductory. We were exposed to some of the categories of factors that affect learning as well as different types of validity and measurement concepts. The measurement concepts, especially, resonated well with me because lack of specificity in questions or statements really bugs me. These basically focused on how you would go about measuring a construct in your testable question.  

I finally started class today. I woke up at around 8:00 AM today to the chill of the rain (my roommate left the window open), because I wanted to get to my class early so I could meet everyone and it takes almost 15 minutes to get there. I brushed my teeth and got ready, then headed downstairs to fill up my water bottle with cereal for later since I don’t really like eating right after I wake up. It kind of took a while to figure out how exactly I was going to get the cereal into the narrow mouth of my bottle. I ended up using a cup to transfer the cereal from the dispenser to my bottle, but this led the people around me to think that there weren’t any bowls yet, so there ended up being a lot of people walking around with cereal in their cups.

Water bottle filled with cereal, and backpack loaded with books, I headed over to my class. There are literally no turns from the dorm to the Psych building, and it’s relatively far, so the walk was pretty boring. To be fair, if it were a little more complicated, I probably would have gotten lost, so I guess I can’t really complain. For some reason, I didn’t see anyone on my way there. Maybe they were all eating or something.

Once I got to the building, finding the class was easy since it was on the first floor. When I walked in, it was just after 9 AM, but there were already 4 or 5 people sitting down who had started to introduce themselves. The first thing that struck me was that I had never seen any of them before (not that that’s a bad thing). Most of the people I’ve talked to so far are in either American Law or neuroscience, so it was good to finally meet the people in my class.

Our professor, Katherine O’Doherty (she told us to call her Kate) walked in right before 9:30 AM, and it turned out that I had chosen one of two seats closest to her. The room is arranged in such a way that there is a long table down the middle of the room, with chairs on either side. It had completely slipped my mind that there would probably be a seat for the professor, too, so I had just casually chosen one of the seats near the head without knowing what I was doing. It was a fortunate turn of events, though, because the class is mostly participation-based, and this way my hand can be seen right away.

The class session itself was fairly introductory. We were exposed to some of the categories of factors that affect learning as well as different types of validity and measurement concepts. The measurement concepts, especially, resonated well with me because lack of specificity in questions or statements really bugs me. These basically focused on how you would go about measuring a construct in your testable question.   

The books from my class.

I had lunch with Lucy, a girl in my class who’s from Shanghai. Initially, I thought that she was from somewhere in the US, because her English is so fluent, but she’s actually not a native speaker. We caught up with some other kids from our class in the dining commons, including Alex, who has Russian parents but grew up in Sweden, and Jerry, a boy from Beijing. We all compared our different school experiences, and it was interesting to see how different the same grade of school can be across the world.

After lunch, we analyzed a document about the deficiencies of the American attitude towards school and had a short informational session about the end-of-year project. The main problem with our school system, according to the article, is that we don’t place enough emphasis on instilling a culture of rigor within our students. Apparently, one of the more major differences between our country and more academically successful countries like South Korea and Finland is the level of intensity and attention which we give school. 

Just the norm at dinner.

The first day of class ended at around 2:30 PM. I went back to the dorms, took a short nap, and then went downstairs to practice my trombone. I managed to get some of the assigned reading in before dinner, which sounds weird to say because I’ve already read both of these books. Dinner came and went, and the rest of my day was spent reading. It was a rather anticlimactic ending to a fun first day, but I really like my class and professor, and I’m looking forward to what we’ll learn tomorrow.