Tutorials and Lectures
Feb 10th, 2010 by Justine Rothbart
At the University of Edinburgh I am taking 3 classes. Usually each class is 20 credits, so I am taking 60 credits. Most people here take 60 credits. Overall, I have less class time that at Mary Washington. The classes I am taking are Archaeology of Scotland, Celtic Civilization, and Architectural History. Here is my schedule of lectures: Archaeology is Monday and Thursday at 9:00 am. Celtic Civilization is Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday at 2:00 pm. Architecture is Monday, Tuesday, Thursday at 4:10. Yeah, the schedule is kind of confusing! There are no Monday, Wednesday, Friday classes! But I do have no classes on friday. These lectures last 50 minutes and they all consist of the lecturer using a powerpoint to teach. There is no student to lecturer interaction. No participation is necessary or allowed. It is just a lot of students in a lecture hall looking at a powerpoint. Our participation comes in when we have tutorials. These are classes of about 10 students. My Archaeology and Celtic Civilization tutorials are every other week, and my Architecture tutorial is every week. People usually make a big deal about the tutorials, but I think they are like most of my classes at Mary Washington. Usually at UMW we have to participate somewhat and we read a little bit before the class. That is what tutorials are. But I only have a few tutorials this semester. We are supposed to do a lot of oustide reading, but it is also unclear what to read. Most classes give us a list of 20 books that we can read, but they do not say what we should specifically read. I prefer having smaller classes and having and interaction with the professor. I expected to have big classes because this is a bigger university. Well, I do like only taking 3 classes!