Rodney Dangerfield's Thornton Melon and I have something in common -- we've both returned to school after a long stretch doing time in the real world. My stretch is nowhere near as long as Thornton's -- I got my B.A. in 1998 and have taken various test-prep and professional skills-building classes in the interim -- but at 29-going-on-30 I still feel like the old lady of my first-year cohort. And although I'm sure the professors will reserve the same level of scorn for me they do for all the other clueless first-years (maybe more, considering how yakking about urban planning is all I'm capable of lately), I really admire their expertise and can't wait to exploit it for personal gain.
Today I had my first two classes: Intro to Planning Theory, and the Legal Environment of Planning. Both are going to be tremendous fun, in different ways. One is as academic and abstract as social/political philosophy can be, but with the necessary wiggle room for lightheartedness that appeals to audiences who aren't yet immersed in the rhetoric. The latter is very much a law-school class -- terminology, cases, and intricacies of policy are rattled off rapid-fire, diagrams and pie charts are drawn and quickly erased for lack of blackboard space. Key subjects are introduced, disappear down a rabbit hole of facts and figures and more facts, and reappear in passing 15 minutes later. And I was able to keep up with about 95-97 percent of that first session, even while my cell phone was ringing with a couple of urgent calls (I didn't answer, but I knew they were important). Lord knows those numbers will drop, but it appears that my few years as a hobbyist dilettante have served me well, and I've (gasp) never even played Sim City.
Tomorrow morning I've got Prof. Banerjee's class on public space -- it's a new course that was listed at the last minute, and the second I got the e-mail about it I dropped one of my requirements so I could fit this into my schedule. The assigned reading looks good: this and this, among other things (inc. this).
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