![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Today's been interesting thus far. This morning after minyan there was opening breakfast, which meant getting a free autographed copy of The Jew Within, shaking the Chancellor-elect's hand, free food and some other talks, including a very witty and funny one from Steve. And I was invited over for Shabbos dinner by the folks who sit right by me at morning minyan: I like them, it'll be nice to get to know them in something other than the daily 2-minutes-of-rewinding-tfillin.
My other Bible teacher and my Talmud TA both got confused as to this year's schedule, and so I spent much of what was supposed to be Bible time helping a classmate with her Talmud homework- which was the beginning of the same piece of Talmud that I did with Adena Fraiser and Steve and Steve last year. I was incredibly excited to realize that not only did I recognize it, I also remembered what was going on- at least in the mishna, which was all that she was assigned. Still, it's a start, and it gave me a bit of a boost.
Then there was an assembly with the Chancellor, which, along with his talk at the breakfast, really did impress me. I already thought highly of his work as a sociologist: his book was one of the ones that was really readable and understandable and really worked from the ground up rather than trying to impose pre-existing ideas on data that may or may not fit it, when I was reading for my thesis. In retrospect, I think that if I'd paid more attention to his analytic work and thought more through that model, I might have produced a slightly better analysis of my own, with a better reflection of some of the women I interviewed. Oh well. And his talk seemed much in the same vein- he was honest, he looked at the facts as they stand, and he didn't back down, or get depressed by things.
Talmud class was supposed to be prep time with the TA, but sans TA we just sort of divided up into trial chevrutata and worked on what we knew of the day's assignment. I'm sure there was a more efficient way to do what we did, but we got a sense of what we were supposed to get a sense of, I think. The guy I worked with was nice, and had some reasonable academic background in the field, but I think I sounded like I was speaking a variety of Yeshivish to him- he had to keep translating my jargon into English and such. I had a hard time getting a sense of what he actually knew and didn't. He'd probably be an ok chevruta, but it's hard to know. I do forget how much terminology I picked up from 4 years at Brandeis, and so much time with people who use the jargon and know the terms and how much I just sort of absorbed all of that. It also highlighted how different that experience was.
My seminar was interesting- I am worried about there being enough repeat stuff from Liturgy at Brandeis that I'll get bored, but that's life, and I'm hoping that there will be enough new stuff that it won't be a problem. Certainly it won't be at the very beginning of the year, and it seems that my whole class is on the stronger side when it comes to prayer background, so that should be a help.
Totally off topic, I read through some of my diary from freshman year of college last night before bed, and I was really shocked by how different my writing style was, at least in that format, and by how unaware I was of certain aspects of my self and what I was doing. It's hard to be aware of that stuff just through memory, but reading what I was writing about my private life really made it quite clear. That's always a bit of a shock.
My other Bible teacher and my Talmud TA both got confused as to this year's schedule, and so I spent much of what was supposed to be Bible time helping a classmate with her Talmud homework- which was the beginning of the same piece of Talmud that I did with Adena Fraiser and Steve and Steve last year. I was incredibly excited to realize that not only did I recognize it, I also remembered what was going on- at least in the mishna, which was all that she was assigned. Still, it's a start, and it gave me a bit of a boost.
Then there was an assembly with the Chancellor, which, along with his talk at the breakfast, really did impress me. I already thought highly of his work as a sociologist: his book was one of the ones that was really readable and understandable and really worked from the ground up rather than trying to impose pre-existing ideas on data that may or may not fit it, when I was reading for my thesis. In retrospect, I think that if I'd paid more attention to his analytic work and thought more through that model, I might have produced a slightly better analysis of my own, with a better reflection of some of the women I interviewed. Oh well. And his talk seemed much in the same vein- he was honest, he looked at the facts as they stand, and he didn't back down, or get depressed by things.
Talmud class was supposed to be prep time with the TA, but sans TA we just sort of divided up into trial chevrutata and worked on what we knew of the day's assignment. I'm sure there was a more efficient way to do what we did, but we got a sense of what we were supposed to get a sense of, I think. The guy I worked with was nice, and had some reasonable academic background in the field, but I think I sounded like I was speaking a variety of Yeshivish to him- he had to keep translating my jargon into English and such. I had a hard time getting a sense of what he actually knew and didn't. He'd probably be an ok chevruta, but it's hard to know. I do forget how much terminology I picked up from 4 years at Brandeis, and so much time with people who use the jargon and know the terms and how much I just sort of absorbed all of that. It also highlighted how different that experience was.
My seminar was interesting- I am worried about there being enough repeat stuff from Liturgy at Brandeis that I'll get bored, but that's life, and I'm hoping that there will be enough new stuff that it won't be a problem. Certainly it won't be at the very beginning of the year, and it seems that my whole class is on the stronger side when it comes to prayer background, so that should be a help.
Totally off topic, I read through some of my diary from freshman year of college last night before bed, and I was really shocked by how different my writing style was, at least in that format, and by how unaware I was of certain aspects of my self and what I was doing. It's hard to be aware of that stuff just through memory, but reading what I was writing about my private life really made it quite clear. That's always a bit of a shock.