The sun is shining and I hope that it stays that way for awhile. My weather tells me that there will be fog tomorrow, but as long as there is no liquid dripping out of the sky, I'm fine with that.
Since classes start for me in three weeks, I've been doing my best to get my mind wrapped around the entire process. They keep trying to frighten me by telling me that twelve hours of graduate courses equal over 20 hours of undergrad. Oh, good heavens what have I chosen to do to myself? The first thing I notice that is different is the intense amount of reading. Textbooks were expensive when I was in college, but I usually paid an arm and a leg for a single book per class. Now, I'm not paying quite as much per textbook, but whew, I'm buying quite a few for each course.
I'm not going to complain about the cost of the books, I'm not really even going to complain about the number of books, but it's already started to overwhelm me, which means that I'm going to do my best to get a large percentage of the reading done before I even begin the class. That way I can maneuver my way through the process and still enjoy myself.
And the reading is phenomenal!
I've been reading (and reading and taking notes and reading) a wonderful book on different cultural subtexts of the period of time surrounding the New Testament. The information seems obvious as I read it, but I feel as if my mind has opened up new pathways for new understanding. I can hardly believe what is happening to me - and this is even before classes begin!
One of the courses is "Christian Foundations: Kingdom, Church and World." I thought that it wasn't going to be that difficult - only six texts to read. Then, I looked at the syllabus - all sorts of scripture to read along with a multitude of online reading, videos to process on AND the guy recommends that we get fourteen other books to read throughout the semester. Errr ... what? Sigh. He's going to be interesting. He and his wife were in Ghana from 1992 - 2001 as missionaries, focusing on water development and church planting. I can see that he is going to be a fascinating man to get to know.
As I begin to browse through the online structure, I am seeing other students do the same thing as part of the Extended Learning campus. This should also be fascinating as I see that there will be multinational students getting their seminary degrees. Oh, the world I'll be exposed to through this program!
I spent time this afternoon getting everything from each syllabus for my course onto a master calendar. It's hanging on the wall behind me now, scaring the pants off me every time I look at it. I'm going to need a belt. This is before I have final copies of each syllabus. The only great thing is that it looks as if each professor has chosen a different day of the week for work to be submitted, so until the last day of classes in December, I should be able to go crazy for something different every day rather than have it all happen on the same day.
I can't wait to meet fellow classmates and tell you all about them. I still haven't gotten past the weird woman from my last class at University of Phoenix - the one who worked with the Cincinnati police department as their psychic counselor. I'm pretty sure that I won't run into any that are quite that strange at Asbury, but I'm betting they will be interesting!
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