A while ago, I stopped getting the urge to write. I don’t think it had to do with any particular event, and if it did, it wasn’t significant enough for me to remember it at this point. I’d check wordpress every now and then, entertain the idea of writing a short post for the hell of it, and then ultimately let Future Terence write something when he’s feeling up to it. Future Terence has arrived, it seems, and I think I owe it to reading. This is just a guess, but I think that the more I read, the more likely I am to write. At times, it’s also when I’m feeling down, but today it seems to stem from the book I just picked up.

As much as I hate to admit it, this book is pretty interesting. It’s a book called Kokoro by Soseki, written in 1914 and it’s required reading for my Japanese history class. It’s a really, really, really long book consisting of 110 chapters (not including intros and other stuff), so I may not finish it by the time our final exam rolls around next Thursday. But it’s interesting, and I’ve started writing again so it’s a win-win. The only problem is that I’m reading it on my phone because I decided to go with the e-book since it wouldn’t ship in time. Not so bad, really, just small.

Read on to see what my shitty semester’s been like!

This semester has been a complete shit tank. My Advanced Japanese class was designed to fail students, I believe. And I’m not saying it out of spite due to the fact that I’ll probably manage getting a D; even the better students agree. I skipped a lot of days, ignored a lot of quizzes and homework assignments, but that’s because the sheer amount of work required was too much. We meet three times a week for 50 minutes each, and almost every single day we have a quiz and homework due (bar one day of two weeks). The lists for the quizzes would often contain up to 60 vocabulary or kanji but we would only be quizzed on 12. This was incredibly frustrating, I do not feel engaged and I do not feel properly educated in the subject because the mentality behind the classroom was, “Throw work at them and hope it sticks.” I cannot remember much of the vocabulary or grammar from earlier chapters because we rarely used it afterwards and there are hardly any exercises to help me understand and remember it.

Of course, part of it is my fault, I could have neglected it less. But seeing as I wouldn’t be getting $575 worth of education out of the class, rather, more like $100, I figured I could spent my time better elsewhere.

I neglected my business class as well because it was a joke. We were being taught the same information we’ve learned in previous classes and I was so enraged when I realized that the book the teacher required was pointless, I decided not to go to class. To top it off, we had a group project due late in the semester. This project was to highlight business norms of specific countries but a large part of the required material of our project seemed to be just busy work that was more suited for a geography class. Needless to say, this class didn’t get a nice review from me at the end of the semester.

All in all, this was a horrible semester. I plan to meet with whoever I need to in order to talk about refunding my account and fussing about the terrible education. I do not want to spend $575 per class to receive unguided education and redundant information.

Next up for writing is my review of the Atrix LapDock. Pointless, since it’s been replaced, but a whole semester of it has been good enough time to garner some loves and hates of the device.