I don't have any classes on Monday so I had the chance to sleep in this morning which felt amazing to say the least. So I woke around noon, had myself a breakfast/lunch meal and made myself a nice cup of tea. It's now one o'clock, so needless to say I haven't done much of anything. So I decided to sit down and update you guys on the past few days.
I left you with an update on my trip to Cambridge and the knowledge that classes started for me. Well I have now been through an entire week of classes and I am excited to get this semester going. Right off the bat there are some big differences between Creighton and Essex. First off, the course syllabi are prepared well in advance of the beginning of term and are placed in their respective department offices. It is the students responsibility to pick it up and to know what is going on once class commences. The first day of classes, as a result, kick off right away with lectures over material that was supposed to be read for that class meeting. In short there is no hand holding, reading through of the syllabi in class, answering of questions about the progression of the term, etc... on the first day of class as there is at Creighton. The responsibility for knowing what is going on falls solely on the student, so if s/he has any questions they must deal with it on their own time, that is to say outside of class.
The class structure is very different than what I have at Creighton as well. At Creighton I meet with all of my classes either on MWF or on TTH. The MWF classes all meet for 1 hour each day, and the TTH classes for 1 1/2 hours on their meeting days. The result is roughly 15 hours of being in-class every week. Here I meet with each of my courses only once a week. Courses, depending on the size of the student enrollment, are formatted (at least for me) in one of two ways; a) a straight up two hour long seminar class period that is a mixture of lecture and class discussion, or b) a one hour long lecture entirely made by the professor followed by a class meeting that is mainly student lead discussion and a Q&A time.
The smaller of my courses (my Joint Seminar in Philosophy and Law and my Philosophy of Mind courses) are set up in manner (a) listed above. My two larger courses (my Ethics and my Contemporary Political Philosophy courses) are set up in manner (b) listed above.
So in total I only spend about 8 hours in class a week.
However, while I spend substantially less time in class, what is expected of me outside of class is substantially greater. The reading lists for the semester, in all of my courses, are several pages long. Which is much greater than what is done at Creighton. The expectation is not that I read all of what is listed, but that I choose what I find interesting and direct my studies accordingly. Basically, the difference can be summed up in this way: At Creighton I am treated as a student in the traditional sense of the term, a receptacle into which the professor pours knowledge; whereas here at Essex I am treated as a fellow scholar in the pursuit of knowledge in the realm of Philosophical exploration.
It is definitely an interesting difference. But as I said in my last post, I am going to withhold my judgments until later on in the term.
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