This includes discussion of tutorials and lectures. If you haven’t read my blog from last week, The Calm Before The Storm, this might be a little harder to follow.
Classes have been interesting… Sometimes in a good way like my first studio class in Introduction to Fine Art. My experience with art is pretty limited to elementary and middle school art classes, so the professor, Tony, was willing to help me out with the basics of painting. He wanted me to do a basic sketch of a painting by Johannes Vermeer, The Milkmaid, which is below.
Then, Tony wanted me to replicate the color in the painting with only the primary colors (blue, red, yellow) and white at my disposal. It was surprisingly difficult to do but also fun and rewarding. It was an exercise in mixing colors, and I didn’t do too bad. Here’s my attempt:
While that was fun, oftentimes classes were needlessly confusing and complicated, and I’m not talking about the difficulty of the subject material. For example, my History of the Welfare State lecture fitted under that category. I expected there would be a little confusion. After all, I’m in a new country, but I was not expecting what happened. At first, I thought I was in the wrong class entirely. The professor kept referring to a class that occurred earlier that same day that was not in my schedule, and they had a PowerPoint up that said Introduction to Social Policy, which was strange because that wasn’t the name of the course. So, I raised my hand, telling the professor that I thought I was in the wrong class, that I was supposed to be in History of the Welfare State. They kindly assured me that I was in the right class. Apparently, The Fall 2022 semester will cover the History of the Welfare State, but the year-long course will cover Social Policy as a whole. That explanation made sense to me, but that didn’t explain why I was missing a class that none of the other students missed. I was originally under the impression that only some of their courses are year-long and others are semester-long, but I’m quite sure almost all of them are, if not all of them. Then, the lecture continued without much of a hitch until we drew closer to the end of class. The professor had clearly not done all that they wanted to do in the one-hour class. They kept saying that they would get to the rest of the lecture on Friday, which was strange. There were no lectures on my schedule for History of the Welfare State for Friday, only a tutorial. I even double checked my schedule to make sure I wasn’t losing it before I approached the professor at the end of class. They promised to talk to someone about why so much was missing from my schedule, and they added me to the correct Moodle, the website Liverpool Hope University uses to distribute class materials to students. (Think of Google Classroom, Blackboard, or Canvas if you are familiar with those websites.) It would be one thing if this problem only occurred once, but that’s not the case at all! I needed to be added to all the classes’ Moodle, and I clearly missed a seminar for my Fine Arts class because it kept getting referenced in my tutorial for Fine Arts, which is just a Fine Arts History class, but that doesn’t make any sense because I didn't see anyone who was in the studio for my first Introduction to Fine Arts class there. I thought the whole point of the tutorial was to be a smaller section of the class. I just got an email from Tony, my studio class professor, inviting me to join the lecture class for next week. I didn’t even know that I missed this past week because it wasn’t on my schedule. I don’t necessarily blame the professors for these mishaps with the schedule, but something has gone wrong here. I’m not the only one experiencing it; all the international students are. I don’t want future international students to have to deal with the same, very preventable issues. I will talk to Carol, the International Student Support Manager, who took us on tours our first two weeks in Liverpool. Maybe she can help work out some of the kinks.
Comments