Report Card

Where I Grade My Courses Before They Grade Me


French 102 – Introductory French 2: A+
Aside from the fact that I want to be able to speak French, and therefore I enjoy French classes, this course is looking like it’s going to be a good one. Unlike 101, this one is actually going to be challenging, because most of it is stuff I have never learnt before. The course outline looks promising, and I really like the way the classes are taught; just like 101, it’s highly interactive, more like a tutorial than a lecture, with the emphasis on you practising, rather than being told what to say. Unfortunately there’s slightly more coursework than there was in 101, because the person in charge has decided that there wasn’t enough of it in the Introductory French papers.



Mecheng 211 – Thermofluids: B+
This one also has a promising course outline. The course is based loosely around studying fluids (ie. liquids and gases) and what you can do with them; particularly focusing on their thermal (ie. temperature) properties. I like the lecturer, except for the fact that he keeps saying “eggzit” instead of “exit”, which really annoys me for some reason. This course doesn’t have too much coursework (3 labs (10%), a test (12%), and 10 quizzes at the beginning of tutorials (18%)). It sucked that we had to buy the textbook [lecturer: “you won’t pass this course unless you buy it”] and that there’s so much to cover that the lectures only briefly focus on the most important points before moving on to the next ones (hence the textbook and our own study) so this course is going to have to be largely self taught. It will require a lot of effort.



Mecheng 222 – Dynamics: B+
Dynamics is a hard subject, which counts against this paper, but it’s an interesting one, once you understand what’s going on. Last lecture (yesterday), the lecturer was covering each point way too fast for me to keep up, so I left and caught a bus, and I’m probably going to need to be spending a lot of time on this one as well. Our current lecturer has a cool East-European-Probably-Slavic accent too. I’ll probably end up buying the textbook to this as well. We were told we would be wanting it later on. The coursework involves 2 projects (25%) and a test(15%), which is pretty good for an Engineering paper. We also get one lab for this which should be good. I like labs.



Mecheng 224 – System Dynamics Modelling, Simulation And Animation: B
Three lectures into this, I still have very little idea what it’s about. We’ve done some stuff on using differential equations to model physical behaviour, which sounds almost exactly like mm2 last semester. The learning objectives don’t help, because they don’t use words any shorter than the ones used in the course name. This lecturer has a cool East-European-Probably-Slavic accent too – and a name to go with it: His name is Vojislav Kecman. The coursework is 2 tests(40%) and 3 projects(60%) with no final exam. The jury’s still out on this paper – it could go either way, but at the moment it gets a very average B.



English 121 – Reading/Writing/Texts: C+
Had the first lecture for this today. I honestly wasn’t sure whether I was going to enjoy this paper or not – it had the potential to either be fairly exciting, or very boring. The lecturer described the paper as “the study of writing” and seems very passionate about it – almost poetical about it! He also has a stutter, which provides for an interesting listening experience. He seems to have a lot of difficulty with words starting with an “a” sound. My interest in this paper was slowly on the rise as things like “writing portfolios” and “examining techniques of writing” and “artistic license” were mentioned – until he said the words “mostly focused on essay writing” - that was the point when my interest in the paper plummeted. It fell further as he went into the importance of essay writing; and received a near-fatal blow as he moved on to developing a good argument, and what an argument is. I had 5 years of that at school without enjoying it much, why would I want to take it further? I’m not that interested in a general writing paper that specialises in essays. This graph gives a rough idea of how my interest in the paper changed during the course of the lecture - the green line marks the approximate time he mentioned the word "essay":















I might drop English 121, because 5 papers (with 3 or so of them very intense) is looking like it’s going to be too much. I’ll see.



Enggen 299 – Workshop Practice: A+
I went to my first workshop expecting something worth a C, but was pleasantly surprised to find that I thoroughly enjoyed myself! Last week we played with lathes, which we will continue to do next week, and then we will move onto milling (whatever that is), then a month on welding and then a couple of weeks playing with vices and hacksaws and drills and stuff! This paper should be extremely fun!





Anyway, I was messing around last night, and I came across this. Check it out!


And here’s this week’s random Wikipedia article.


Now I’m hungry. Time to go eat.


Cyz~