February 07, 2005
Light Posting Ahead
Well, when I said, “But I’ll try to keep it light for at least a little while to give everyone (esp. myself) a breather,” I did mean light in tone, not quantity. Oops. Unfortunately, post frequency is probably going to stay light for a while due to my night class.
My “Principles of Macroeconomics” course at Mission College is over, and I got an A (yay me!). Actually not that big a deal, given that it’s a community college, and I came into it already knowing a thing or two about the subject (although I still learned a lot). Plus, the workload wasn’t as bad as I expected, given that there wasn’t too much reading (I could get through a chapter in one or two nights, and we generally took 2-3 weeks per chapter), and the homework problems were easy if you understood the material.
Well, this semester, I’m taking a Political Science course, “Comparative Governments.” Political Science is another subject in which I’ve never ever taken a class (my wife keeps remarking on her shock at how Berkeley’s College of Engineering doesn’t require you to have the same core that most other colleges do). Unlike economics, however, I don’t have much background knowledge. Unless you count being a news and political junkie and bit of a voting theory geek (although this class won’t cover that). And if the first two chapters are any indication, this class’ll be harder going for me.
Of course, I could be wrong again, as I warned about lighter posting for my economics class, and it didn’t really happen. But I’d thought I’d give y’all a heads-up.
Of course, another reason my blog posting has always been relatively infrequent is that I tend to strive for completeness before I put up a blog post. I discussed this here and in more depth here. In brief, I strive for an extremely high signal to noise ratio in a blog post. If I put something up on this here Intarweb, I want it to be worth reading for both regular readers and people who happen to come here via Google searches. And since I intend for the page to remain up indefinitely, I tend to be quite perfectionist about them, so I often do a lot of reading up before I post on a topic (which is a big reason I haven’t yet said much about Social Security).
However, I don’t view comments the same way. As I’ve said earlier:
I view the ideal blog…like a newspaper article or column, where readers turn for information, commentary, or analysis. I view blog comments more like message boards, where the whole point is to experience and explore a wide variety of different viewpoints.
Thus I have no problem writing comments on topics about which I have little or no expertise or knowledge, and so I regularly comment on other blogs with much more frequency than my blog posting.
In addition, as I noted earlier, I’m also tracking my comments via the del.icio.us social bookmarking manager. Indeed, those of you who’ve seen my main page may have noticed I added a feature to display “My Comments Elsewhere” on my sidebar (just below “Recent Comments”). This is via the RSS feed that del.icio.us generates for the myComments tag of my bookmarks, so you RSS readers can just subscribe to that if you’re interested. I do tend to bookmark just comments that I think are worth reading, so I don’t bookmark ones that just say hi. It ends up being an average of about 4-5 comments a day (and if you’d like to see a preview of some of what I’ll be blogging about soon, check out this comment thread). So if you really need a fling93 fix in between postings, you can read my comments.
Either that or seek psychiatric help, but I figure reading comments’ll be much cheaper.
February 07, 2005 07:45 PM in Blogging, School | PermalinkI went to community college for a year and thought it was great. I admit that some of the students weren’t as sharp as the ones at the regular college I went to later, but the professors were very good. I suspect that at least part of the reason the class was easy for you is that you’re now a grown-ass man. School should be easier than you remembered it.
Posted by Will at 02/09/05, 11:49 AM (link)Congratulation to your A!
I work and study in a community college and some of our students are sharper than those who attended an American four year college because they come with impressing educational backgrounds from other countries. They just don’t have the necessary pocket money or a rich daddy to enroll in a four year institution.
Posted by Silvia at 02/09/05, 12:07 PM (link)Will: I went to community college for a year and thought it was great
Oh, I definitely have no complaints about the quality of the teaching or the material covered, in case that wasn’t clear (well, we didn’t quite get through the syllabus, but that’s more because of the other students). I definitely learned a lot. It was just easier than I expected.
Will: I suspect that at least part of the reason the class was easy for you is that you’re now a grown-ass man.
Yeah, after watching my wife go back to college, I’m certain that school is wasted on the young, who just wanna get it done with and out into the real world. So maybe it was surprisingly easy because of my interest, or because economics is one of those subjects that sounds a lot harder than it really is (at least at the undergraduate level, where you don’t need complicated math). I still think PoliSci will be harder work, but we’ll see.
Oh and hey, congrats to your Patriots. That was a great game. And I think they gave the MVP to the right person this time. I was afraid that they might give it to Harrison (after botching it the last two years — I think it should’ve been Delhomme last year and Simeon Rice the year before).
Hmmm. We need to pick a country to focus on in my PoliSci class. I wonder if Red Sox Nation qualifies. :)
Silvia: Congratulation to your A!
Thanks! Interesting point about the money aspect (you’d think someone who just studied econ would’ve realized that).
Posted by fling93 at 02/09/05, 12:13 PM (link)