Thursday, May 24, 2012

In Retrospect...

... taking six classes was completely insane. But I survived, so although I will never do that again, all's well that ends well.

My final grades are as follows
Medieval Lit. in Translation: A
290: A
Old Norse: A
Computing for Poets: A
History of England: B+
Latin Love Poetry: B

Not bad for a six class (five-and-a-half credit) overload. And on top of all of that, I did chorale, world music ensemble, was on the Christian Fellowship leadership team AND captained the archery club. I'm surprised I survived at all. 

The only grade I'm really disappointed with is the History of England grade because it was the result of poor writing in two of the papers, and not at all an issue of not understanding the material. The whole semester was so busy, and all my papers were due at the same time at least twice, and oddly enough, I don't think there were enough of them.  I didn't have the chance to regain my writing skills until the last few papers. But other than that, the class was really, really excellent. I loved the class, and especially enjoyed Froissart's Chronicles and, of course, Bede's Ecclesiastical History.  

Latin actually went pretty well - after the abysmal midterm, but since I was able to pull up that grade with some extra credit, I think I got As on all but one paper, and probably a B on the final. I'm still learning at a steady but irritatingly slow rate, and I hope that this summer I'll have a chance to solidify and improve my grammar and vocabulary... 

Old Norse got rough towards the end, not because it was particularly hard, but because the end of the semester was so busy, but we translated parts of Hrafnkell's Saga as well as a very strange version of Tristram and Isolde among other things. 

Computing for Poets went brilliantly well, after those initial difficult weeks, and even though the actual programming was hard, the writing aspects went over well. Because since I was able to do so much work with Anglo-Saxon and Tolkien, things went a lot better than I originally anticipated. 

290 was one of the best classes I had this semester. Professor Krebs is a fantastic teacher, and I learned a lot about literary criticism and can now decide to use it, should I so wish. For the final project, my partner and I wrote a 20 page paper and were told that it was fantastic, which is arguably one of the best moments of this semester! I also made a bunch of friends in the class, which was very nice.  

Medieval Lit went really well, though I wasn't much of a fan of Dante's Inferno in comparison to the other things we read this semester. I got an 100 on the midterm, and probably something in the high 90s on the final, so all in all, a very good semester on that front. 

This summer should be excellent, England is in a little over a month, and I'm on my second day of my work with Professor Drout on Lexomics, which so far has involved working on content for the Wheaton web page for the project. There were several moves in the past two weeks, which was stressful, but things are settling in pretty well. 

I hope to maybe have time to blog this summer, and in England, and there will definitely be pictures once I go.