Okay, it’s second semester of my first year of college in this plan I'm doing, and already I’m a week and a half behind. I will catch up this week and then do the project the way I intended, which is a day at a time.
“This semester”, I am taking first of all Introduction to Psychology with Jerome Kagan. I was trying to take some courses that would meet requirements in majors I was considering, otherwise I might have skipped to some other less intro course. I did know somehow that Professor Kagan was a major scholar, and he was a great teacher for the intro class. I can’t yet find my notes, so I may have to settle for some general memories later on, plus the one paper I do have.
I also remembering shopping a class called Psychobiology, which perhaps today we would call neuroscience. The lecture was about the corpus callosum, and what was learned from people for whom the connection between the two halves of the brain had been compromised. For some reason I decided the hard science of the course would be too demanding for me, maybe too much memorizing things I didn't think I was good at? Or maybe that I would go back and take the class if I chose psychology as a major, but only if that happened. This is the second example of a class I remembering shopping and not taking but where I remember the first lecture vividly. I’d looked at a class called Conceptions of Human Nature first term, and the first lecture talked about Freud and Marx, I remember, as dramatic contrasts in views of the basic premises of what a human is like.
I took a Government course, Political Development of Western Europe, with Professor Peter Hall. This was recommended as both a good background for and a taste of the Social Studies concentration. Professor Hall got great ratings in the student course evaluation guide. I wasn’t going to take the course because of the 300ish pages of weekly reading, but when I mentioned this to my parents my mom said, “Are you afraid of taking a class with a lot of reading?” I said, “No,” and then took the class. Thanks Mom! Also I guess I was considering majoring in Government, and maybe this would also be a way to get a requirement done, though I can't remember how much that was in my calculation.
I don’t think I was considering history as a major too seriously, but I did want to take another Jewish Studies course, and a visiting Israeli professor named Israel Bartal was offering a course on the history of Zionism. I think I knew a lot of the timeline from my Muss program in 11th grade, and then reading Sachar’s History of Israel and a bunch of other things related to Israeli history in high school, some of them over and over. Obviously this would be a deeper, more critical dive.
I needed a Core course, and something less demanding. I ended up with a Literature and Arts C course, Empire and Art in the Medieval West I think it was called, with Professor Nora Nercessian. My neighbor Terry took it too. I guess I liked that it might touch on religion a bit, maybe, and also that it wouldn’t stray too far from history I knew something about from high school. I was always intrigued in high school by the notion of the Holy Roman Empire, for some reason. Not positive about that or what else I considered there in choosing this course, or which other options I discarded.
The first couple classes in the art class were about how the Germanic rules starting with Charlemagne claimed succession to the Roman imperial crown in some sense. Professor Nercessian reviewed some of the Roman imperial self-representations, in sculpture and a bit in architecture, focusing on Augustus, Trajan, Diocletian, and Constantine. There were nuances revealing their perceptions or backdrops of order vs. chaos in the world, dominance as an emperor, human power verging sometimes into a kind of chosenness by God. Charlemagne and successors would consciously imitate some of this, though they did not have access to the quality of materials or craftsmanship that the Roman and Byzantine emperors had.
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