School Stuff

My Courses:

Drama 3: literature and theory lectures 4 days a week and practical workshops once a week for first term, more on those later

The Environmental History of South Africa: lectures 3 times a week, one is a double period, and seminar groups every other week

isiXhosa: Grammar and vocabulary lectures twice a week, tutorials with isiXhosa mother-tongue tutors twice a week, and once a week cultural lectures

In case you couldn’t tell this is a lot of class time.

Here courses meet for 45min periods, and there are officially 10 periods in a day starting at 7:45am and ending at 6pm.

Rhodes uses a tutorial system, which are basically (compulsory) small discussion groups lead by a senior student. Students prepare assignments and are expected to do reading for their ‘tuts’. As I understand it, this is where most of the class discussion happens and lectures are mostly just well, lectures.

The only tutorials I have are for isiXhosa, but I would describe those classes as a conversation class, trying to get us more comfortable speaking isiXhosa.

My history class has a seminar every other week. We prepare a short paper (1000-1500 words) about an assigned topic and discuss it in small groups with our professor.

Drama has practicals, “pracs”, which for the first term are once a week workshops with the different faculty in the department. Next term we will each pick two fields that we want to pursue more in depth. These include stage management (which can also include some rigging), design elements, performance, dance performance, applied theater, directing, and playwriting. You have to audition for each section, and people generally audition for three or four so that the faculty can have some flexibility in organizing people.

The other interesting element here is that classes are held at a different time each day, so my Drama class is at 8:40 on Monday, 10:05 on Tuesday, 10:30 on Wednesday, and 11:55 on Thursday, and every course is like that! On Tuesday I missed my isiXhosa course because I got the time confused (I thought it was the Weds. time, which is later). I don’t know why they do it this way, and no one has been able to tell me except that that’s just they way things are. Apparently that’s how many high schools are organized too.

I’m really enjoying my classes. Drama is looking at “Re-imagining Popular Theatre”. We’ve been studying Dario Fo, and today we’ll being looking at Brecht & Cabaret.

The Environmental History of South Africa is also really fascinating. We’ve got a very small class, and even fewer who show up to classes regularly! But on Tuesday everyone showed up because we had a guest lecturer come and talk about the history of alcohol, and he brought samples. It was both informative and entertaining!

I'm getting a little more comfortable with isiXhosa. Having to say things over and over in the tut really helped.