12th April 2018

Thursday.

The first week of Spring quarter is almost ending. Something about having to change routines, classes, and professors every three months just irks me. I like routine, believe it or not. I hate having to adjust to a new format of life just when I was starting to get used to the old one.

This quarter, I maxed out the number of units I could take but fortunately, my class hours are a lot more tolerable. No more 7.30AM classes and ending at 10PM.

My political science professor is a short, stubby mixed-Asian lady in her late twenties who is way too enthusiastic to be teaching a group of soul-dead college students. Regardless, I appreciate her efforts to make and be relatable. Her buoyant, exuberant personality is needed to balance out the gloom and angst in the room. As an introduction, she showed us a commercial video she shot for Honda years ago that showed her driving her and her friends in costumes to cosplay conventions. She talked about coming from the safest city in the world - Stockton - and taught political science for many years before moving here to the Bay Area with her husband whom she has been with for twelve years. During lessons, she would bounce around the classroom while talking in this almost ghetto-way, her voice easily echoing across the classroom.

"Do y'all know why Wednesday is my favorite day of the week?" she asked, which she did almost every Wednesday from then on out. The class, as usual, remained unresponsive to this rhetorical(?) question.

"Cause it means we're closer to Fridays." she said. "And y'all know I love Fridays." Then at some point during lessons, she would emphasize again, in case we didn't already know, how much she loves food. "It's only 9.45am now but I'm already thinking about lunch." she says. "Then when it's lunch, I think about dinner. Y'all know I just love food."

My English writing professor is a slim, soft-spoken, and kind lady with fashion tastes similar to mine.  During the first week, she made it a point to memorize all of our names, and would go down row by row trying to recall each and every of our names at the beginning of lessons. When she teaches, she would sometimes burst into spouts of laughter after saying certain things.

"So yes, back then in rural America, men weren't very...privy of women's physical boundaries." she said with a tinge of awkwardness and consideration, and does her small, yet radiant laugh. She is just so precious, but she also made us read passages from the novel out loud in class, individually.

I have the same math professor from the last quarter, so I'm a little happy that at least one of the classes I'm taking will still feel like routine. He is Russian and speaks in a very thick accent unintelligible to many of my classmates, but I still found it a little understandable - at least more understandable than his handwriting. He would begin every sentence with "Okay," and then mumble on and on about parametric equations conversion in that stocky accent of his. To tell the truth, his lessons were always difficult to understand, because although people could understand what he was saying, no one ever knew what he was explaining about, and whether we actually needed to know these things.

Physics is the only class I'm worried about this quarter. Our professor is rumored to be the toughest Physics lecturer on campus. Seeing that his last name is also Newton, I don't doubt it. He is a tall, white man who lectures without his shoes, and is very critical about students who asks questions during lecture. My first impression of him wasn't very good; he gave off this assholish vibe when he talked. He would say things like "If you thought this was correct, you are not prepared for this class." or "You should be able to answer this question in three seconds otherwise you're an idiot."

Gradually I've come to accept his harsh teaching style. Every lesson he would do or say something that made the class erupt in laughter. There were always students who rebutted whenever he said something that was incorrect in the physics sense but acceptable in the molecular Chemistry sense, and then he would give the student a half-admonishing stare that made the class giggle, and turned around to resume lecture with an almost grandfatherly-smile. Students would answer his rhetorical questions so often that he had to say "-don't answer, I'll tell you." after every question he posed.

My Physics lab lecturer is the same lecturer I had for my prep physics class two quarters ago, the same one who told me I would do very well if I continued working hard (you can refer back to my mid-December log where I mentioned this) but I doubt he remembers me. I've never really enjoyed Physics lab. Chemistry lab was nice, because every lab was just individual work with all the steps laid out on a piece of paper for you to follow, and when you started work you just entered this zen-like mode. Physics lab is nothing like that. It's always group work, which can get messy with ambiguous work distribution, and there was never clear instructions on what to do.

I just can't wait to get used to routine again.