My Highly Complicated Classes

People keep asking me about my classes, so let me give you a brief explanation. It is long and tedious, but in case you were wondering, here it is:

I am taking:

Two tutorials

One Integrative Seminar

One British Landscapes Course

Tutorials are one on one meetings between a professor (tutor) and a student. They meet once a week to discuss a paper the student has written and prepared in answer to a question (prompt) the tutor assigned. Each paper is 8-10 pages long and takes about 20 hours to research properly and then write. I have two of these. My primary one meets once a week and is on Politics and Culture in Cold War Europe. My secondary tutorial meets once every two weeks and it is on the Crusades.

Ok, so that’s the main part of my course work. They start next week.

The History Integrative Seminar focuses on historiography and will meet during the last four weeks of the semester. However, throughout the semester I need to be thinking about and beginning to research the 4000 word essay that is due at the end of the term. I get to choose the topic!

The British Landscapes course takes place in the last four weeks of the semester, so I’m not going to talk about it.

In conjunction with each of these, I am required to attend 32 lectures on topics related to them. The lectures are just walk-in talks on lots of different topics that an Oxford professor giving. They tend to come in series of 8, once-a-week, lectures but each stands alone. So I will probably pick and choose 8 lectures on the Cold War from different series on Modern History. But I will probably go to all 8 in the series “Aspects of the Crusades,” because it reflects what I am learning in my secondary tutorial.

Now, that ought to be as clear as mud, but hopefully it makes a little sense.