Current mood:	accomplished
Current music:	Franz Ferdinand - All for You, Sophia
Entry tags:	happy, history, school

Damn.
I think World War I is my favourite class I've ever taken.
Tonight was the final class, sadly. Next week is the exam. So we wrapped everything up, talked about the Treaty of Versailles and the impact of the war and such, and I'm taking a step back and looking at my half-a-composition-book-ful of notes and all my handouts and everything we've done in what, only 9 weeks?
Crazy.

Best class ever, Joy? Really?
Yeah, I think so. For what I got out of it and everything overall, yeah.
That's not to say I was excited to go to class every week (I wasn't looking forward to going tonight at all, actually. I wanted to stay home.). There were some lectures too, that bored me to death. You can tell a lot about how interested I'm in a subject by the notes I take. For say, 75% of the classes in this course, there are pretty detailed notes organised well with minimal doodling. When you get to the night we talked about the naval war... I'm pretty sure that after about a page of notes I just stopped writing them period, and doodled or fell asleep for the rest of the time.

The class wasn't easy, either. Definitely not. There's a lot of concepts, and a lot of things to wrap your head around. It was challenging, but not discouragingly hard. Yeah, I worked for 5+ hours to finish a homework assignment, but how fulfilling did it feel once I got it done? How great did I feel to have it passed back and I got an A on it? Hard work paying off is always nice. (To contrast with my other two college classes: I worked pretty hard on my Sociology term paper and got a 75 on it. I didn't work hard at all on my Sign Language book report, and it wasn't really very good either, and I got a 100.)

Like I've said before, it helps that I like the topic. I'm not going to be taking Mr. Westheider's WWII class next quarter, because it would probably kill me. The teacher is absolutely awesome, but I just would not be motivated to do it.
The first time we ever went over WWI at school was in 9th grade. Gawd, Mrs. Napier was the worst. I don't entirely blame her, because if I had to teach freshman history all day for years on end I would probably be horrible to everyone too. But the next year, Spitzer was our teacher, and he was the best.
He put a big emphasis on the cause and effect of the war, and he motivated me to go and read All Quiet on the Western Front and he was just a young, hip and totally awesome teacher. He knew lots of random stuff and was just this big, fantastically huge nerd.
Anyway it's probably all Spitzer's fault that I like WWI.

Fantastic class. I'm so glad to have taken it. Very rewarding, and I learned a ton. And I've got two history books in my bag right now as a direct result of the class, that I'm now reading for pleasure.
Gaah, I'm turning into Faye! I shouldn't be reading history books! Hell, I shouldn't even be reading nonfiction! What's wrong with me? :P

~Joy's changed this past year, though probably not for the worse.