Today was the first day of classes and I feel so overwhelmed. I went to 5 classes today because I'm still "shopping" around for classes to take. MIT has various requirements for humanities classes to make sure we're well rounded or something like that and we need to take 3 classes classified as "HASS-D". I haven't taken any so I need to take at least 2 this semester. I really want to take all three. Anyhow, my two morning classes today were pretty interesting.
My first class of the semester is a class that I didn't pre-register for called East Asia and the World 1500-2000. It was taught previously by Professor Peter Perdue who is a really amazing east Asian historian who I had the chance to meet last year. Unfortunately he is at Yale now. The professor who is teaching the class this semester seems pretty interesting person though. As soon as he started talking about Chinese history, I knew that he must know more Chinese than I do even though he is Caucasian (but probably not American since he has an accent...). I found out later from the history department's website that he studied Chinese literature at Fudan University. Anyhow, part of this first class, we watched the Olympics opening ceremony. He just showed all the historical stuff and asked us about the image that China wants to present to the world. Man, everything is so different when you discuss this stuff with an actual historian rather than just hearing the comments from NBC. He also showed a few seconds of a documentary called River Elegy which was produced in 1988 by some Chinese people talking about how Chinese culture came from the Yellow River and how the Chinese society needs to move away from this "river culture" in order to advance. It sounds like a really interesting film which I will watch sometime soon (probably this weekend) and comment more about it here.
Right after this I went to Chinese III Streamlined which was way oversubscribed. I thought it's a good class to follow up on what I did in Cambridge since this class, unlike Chinese I and II, is more focused on media and "real" stuff instead of just learning from a textbook. We get to watch movies, listen to songs, read articles, etc. Anyhow, after we did all the admin stuff, we watched a few minutes of..... the Olympic Opening Ceremony. This time the CCTV version. I think I will spend some time watching the CCTV version since it seems like they did not cut out a bunch of stuff like NBC did. They also used a lot of flowery language that I did not understand but they sounded much more enthusiastic than the NBC commentators.
So these 2 classes seem to complement each other. The only problem is that they're both on a Mon, Wed schedule which would mean that I would have way too many classese those days and not enough on Tues and Thurs. It would be nice if my classes were a little more spread out. Also, I'm not sure if I can get into the Chinese class since it is oversubscribed but the teacher is the one I had for Chinese I and she's very nice. Anyhow, this all depends on how my classes tomorrow go. Because even though the 2 classes I took today were interesting, neither of them were like "I MUST take this class". So, we'll see.
Okay, I need to do some reading and get things together so I will write about my other classes later. Just thought I'd tell everyone that I'm already feeling very stressed!! Life at MIT... yup.
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