It’s funny, when I know I have to write something, like a paper or this blog, I will come up with all these ideas in my head, and sentences form rather easily, but when I start writing I can’t seem to be able to write good and stuff. Not that I would win a Pulitzer prize for my brain sentences in the first place, but I digress.

Here are the facts: I am a 26 year old who is returning to college full time to finally get a bachelor’s degree. I am majoring in Art History and this is my first semester at George Mason University. My first day back at school after a 6 year break was filled with lessons, both in and outside of class;

Lesson 1: You apparently can’t cut through the engineering building on Fairfax campus. Perhaps if I was equipped with a map and more than 10 minutes to get to class I may have been successful. Alas, on my first day of classes, I was not successful.

Lesson 2: For the love of all that is good in this world never bring all of your textbooks to school on the first day of class. This is especially true if a.) you are taking chemistry and art history classes and your textbooks are very, very heavy, and  b.) on the first day of classes it happens to be over 90 degrees Fahrenheit outside. I arrived at half of my classes literally dripping with sweat. Not the kind of first impression I wanted to make.

Lesson 3: Sometimes your classes are not what you expect them to be. Which finally brings us, in a round-about way, to History 390 The Digital Past, which I think I am supposed to use as my main topic for this blog.

I understood Hist 390 to be a course that would teach history using modern technology. Translated in my nerd brain to mean things like, “Let’s use computer reconstruction to find out what this ancient building looked like when it was built.” or “Check out these new technologies museums use to preserve and archive its artifacts.” Total history nerd stuff. Hist 390, at least this current semester, is centered around music for the majority of the class, I have never taken a music class in my entire college career, and if I had known it was going to predominately music focused I probably wouldn’t have registered for this course. I adore listening to music, but I have no understanding of music in a scientific or technical way. I believe not having some sort of technical music knowledge will hinder my ability to do well in this class, despite Professor O’Malley saying otherwise. This class deals with American music from the past century for its history portion. I am selfishly biased when it comes to American history, really only interested in my personal family history from the past 2 centuries or so. Finding out about my relatives who served in the Civil War, and listening to my grandparents tell stories from the times they were apart during World War II, that I find fascinating. Start talking about American history in a broader sense and I start to feel less interested. After our last class on Wednesday I had decided to drop the class and look for another course to take instead. After perusing the other classes online I couldn’t find a class to replace Hist 390, looks like I am stuck with it to the end.

My next blog will be more about what we covered in class, and what I think about it.

Until next time.