Time to kill

Classes began today. Once again the familiar thrill of throwing oneself into the hustle bustle of student life. Once again the familiar routine of hurry up and wait. 5 hour wait between classes makes for an extremely long day. However, it will let me visit all sorts of museums during off-hours if I ever become so inclined. Judging by my enthusiasm level for museums so far, I'm not quite certain this will ever happen!

Anyways. After the disasterous methodology course, I was a little anxious about the instructors here. However, I am happy to say that the first class went well. It's definitely an odd dynamic though. 1/3 of the class were international students and the others were French Sciences Po students. The teacher gamely tried to solicit feedback from the classroom during the lecture but the combination of a language barrier and it being the first class definitely made it harder than normal to get people talking. Being that my lectures are all in English (a subject that I suspect I will lament a few times over the next few months) I expect to see this dynamic occur again a few times. With any luck it will be temporary and class discussions will be lively.

The one nice thing that I'm finding out about the Sciences PO teaching style is that they very much prefer their teachers to have practical experience in the subject areas that they are teaching. For isntance, my morning class on 'Media In Transition' is being taught by one Peter Gumbel , a life-long journalist. My entire time at Concordia I was taught by professors who have mainly known nothing but academia so I'm rather excited to be able to learn from people with decades of experience in subject matters I'm interested in. The fact that I'm extremely interested in almost all of my courses should hopefully mitigate some of the chagrin I feel for enrolling in all English courses in France!

On an unrelated note, I spent the weekend in Lille visiting a friend from Montreal. I apologize once again for the lack of pictures as it is quite the picturesque city. To be quite frank I'm simply not motivated to be taking pictures (nor to write much). It's a bit of a shame as I fear I'll have no concrete reminders of my time here. No matter, life is but a fleeting moment.