Work, Work, Work, Work, Work

All I have to say is that the next 10 weeks of my life are going to be a pain in the rear end. Every waking moment I will either be in class or doing homework. I am taking five classes, 16 credits, this term which is pretty usual for me. This term is just ridiculous though. Every class I have requires so much outside work.

I sat down yesterday and went through all of my syllabuses so that I could organize my planner. Here is a picture of it. Every little round sticker you see is either a test or paper or assignment due. I am not going to have a life for the next two months. I already can't wait until Christmas break and it is only week two of classes!

And then there are the papers. One of my classes is online and is called Culture and Gastronomy. It is a very intensive writing class about the history and culture of food. It requires a lot of reading and a one thousand word paper every week. Luckily the information for the papers are posted on Fridays and not due until Tuesdays, which gives me the whole weekend, but that means I am going to be spending a lot of my weekends reading and writing papers on top of all of the other homework I have to do.

The first paper for this class is due this Tuesday. I have to "make a case for cooking not fire as a 'revolution' in the progress towards civilization." I actually feel like I could write a lot about this. I just need to sit down with all the books and articles we had to read and go over them making sure that I use as much information as possible from these resources. I think that this is what Chef Bottone really wants. He wants to see that we read what we needed to and used the reading to guide our response papers. I think I am going to spend a few hours tonight getting all my thoughts together and actually writing them down on paper.

I think my dilemma for all of the papers that I will have to write this term is how to begin. I always feel like I need a good opening to my papers and sometimes it can take me a while to find the right words. I wish that I could write my academic papers like I write my blogs. For my blogs I just start writing. I don't really think about it, I just let my thoughts flow. Obviously for academic papers you have to be more careful about grammatical errors and all of that stuff, but I think I need to just start our writing my academic papers like I write my blogs. Maybe it will help all my ideas come out of my brain a little easier, and quicker.