I Second That Semester

Yesterday, I turned in my last assignment for grad school, which I hope will finish my work for this semester.  I'll explain shortly.  I only took two classes this time around.  I should have taken three, but I just barely made it through last semester taking three.  Although, each one was a literary criticism course.  This time, neither course was literary.  The first was syntax, the science of language.  The majority of my time was spent making diagrams of fairly simple sentences.  These were not the type of diagrams we once did in grade and high school.  Or college if you took a linguistics class.  No, these were much more thorough and complicated.  Every word took at least two lines and multiple descriptors just to get done.  While the actual reading for class was a manageable half hour or so a week, it would take an hour just to get the diagramming done for one of the harder sentences once every detail was introduced.  By contrast, it took me about six hours minimum for each of my classes' reading material last semester per week, plus another hour or two to do the lessons related to that material.  Things would have been easier if I could have written the diagrams down on paper so I could turn them in, but I couldn't because it was an online class.  That would have cut my work time by half.  As it was, I had to figure out how to use the simple graphic features of my MacBook's word processing program, Pages, without any training or manual to help me out.  It was a very sharp learning curve, especially when I started to use the more complicated details in my diagrams.  Things could have been made easier if I had found the freehand drawing tool before I was finishing up on my final paper.  Seriously, it would have made things so much easier if I had found it sooner.  It might help me out with my icon, once I get back around to it.  My other class was a fiction writers' workshop.  I had to read a chapter from a book, then take a one hour open book test over what I had read.  That should have been one a week, but there was a month long gap where there weren't any chapters.  I also had to submit two short works of non-genre fiction, then respond to the stories of everyone else in class.  That amounted to fourteen other stories I wound up reading.  So many of them were depressing, and even violent at times.  By comparison, my stories were rather simple and connected.  In fact, they were the start of a second book I had been thinking about.  Look at my literary blog, The T. H. Weingarten Miscellany, for those.  The strange thing is that I don't think I had to turn in any revised works.  I just took everyone else's ideas and work with them on my own schedule, and possibly never do anything else with the stories again.  I will, but not for this class.  As least I don't think so, and I have yet to find anywhere on the site where I could do that anyway.  So, the semester is over.  I won't know for a while when, or where, I will take more classes.  I am on a conditional status that might not allow me to take any more courses until it gets resolved.  Also, there are two summer courses, Modern Drama and a Poetry Workshop, that I could take if I get the chance. As to fall, I might have some different plans.  More on that later.