First day of classes

I had my first class of the spring term today. It's my once a week evening class, Environment & History. I think this class should be both interesting and relatively easy (it's a 300-level class). It starts at 5:30pm and is scheduled until 9:10, but our instructor said it won't last much more than 3 hours each time. I think I'll be fine with the shorter class in this particular case.

This class is basically a history of man's interaction with nature and the environment, focusing mostly on the last 200-500 years. There will be two exams, a mid-term and a final, and two 1000-1200 words papers on two of the four books we are going to be reading. The first paper (and first book we read), which everyone must do, will be on the global history of malaria. The second is our choice on the remaining three books. The books aren't really very long and they all seem well written and easy to read. The papers seem ridiculously short, but that will make me be more specific, which seems hard to do sometimes. Still, this should be a pretty easy class. Attendance is mandatory. Missing a single class will drop your grade by half a letter. I guess that seems reasonable for a class that only meets once a week.

My next two classes are on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10am to 2pm. The later class is Marxist Political Economy [insert fascist, marxist, socialist, or communist joke here]. There are three books for this class, two of them are quite dense and long. Even though I've been wanting to read Marx's most famous work, Capital, Volume 1, for a couple of years, I'm not really looking forward to it. I'm pretty sure most of it will be dry and boring. And long (1000 pages). Like a lot of the "classics" are. Hopefully, there won't be too much writing in this class.

My morning class is not what I expected to be taking this term. I saw the syllabus for the class I was thinking of taking and it was almost exactly the same as the Green Power Econ class I just took. It would have been a waste of time taking that class from him. I may still take it from the other instructor? We'll see when the time comes. I ended up signing up for Environmental and Natural Resources Economics. I wanted to take this class eventually, but the teacher is the same one I had for Intermediate Microeconomics and I didn't really care much for. But this is the only class that was left that worked, schedule-wise, for me and the other two classes I am taking. Hopefully he's gotten a little more organised since I had him last fall. I'm trying to stay positive about this class. I expect one writing assignment in this class, as that seems to have become a requirement for every class, even classes like math.

I haven't quite figured out what I'm going to do for lunch on these two days since there is only 10 minutes between classes. Maybe it will be alright to eat in at least one of them. If not I can live with that. We'll see.