Week One - So Tired

I keep telling myself that I am not behind, that I am caught up with
the things that matter...but then I notice it has been a month since
school started and not one blog item. Here's what I can recall of the
first week.

If I leave for school at 6:00 I can make it with time to spare for the
7:30 daily office, with plenty of time to get to the 8:00 class. I've
learned since then that even leaving at 6:05 may mean missing the
prayer service.

I'm not used to getting up so early, and was too excited to get much
sleep the first night. It is hard to get up and get out by 6. I
don't understand why this is so much harder than leaving the house by
7. Every day I seemed more and more tired.

Friday morning, as I was walking to my first class, a classmate
commented that he felt great! He had a great night's sleep, he had
gone to bed early, at 10pm. For this old lady, 10 pm is late!

At first I thought my least stressful class would be Old Testament.
The professor doesn't give tests/papers, just a quiz every class, and
students can drop 3 of the 26 scores. I studied, and prepared one
paragraph essay answers to the questions I anticipated. Instead, it
was fill-in-the-blank detail questions. I answered 3 of 5 questions,
and found out that two of those answers were incorrect when he went
through the quiz after we turned them in. 1 out of 5 points won't
work on any scale! I came home and immediately got out my scholarship
materials--and verified that I have to keep a 3.5 or lose the
scholarship. I was hoping that it was a 3.0 or 3.2. Oh well.

Spoke with Matt, who is freshman at Mizzou, and he gleefully told me
that he made an A on his first quiz. :-)

My Old Testament professor loves to point out the inconsistencies in
the texts. Some of what he sees as inconsistencies I have no problem
with. For example, in the creation account, he says "a day is a day"
and each day of creation would be 24 hours--he insists in interpreting
the text literally so that he can better point out inconsistencies.
But for me, I don't have a problem with this. I imagine Moses, or
some other prophet, seeing a vision of creation, and trying to express
and describe this as best possible--which means poetry.

History of Christian Thought is an amazing class. It's team taught.
One professor teaches for 50 minutes, the other addresses oversights
and also highlights themes in the previous lecture for 10 minutes,
then they both answer questions for 10 minutes. It's amazing to see
the interaction between a lover of church history and a lover of
liturgy. They bring out the best in each other. I'm so glad that I
listened to lectures on tape of philosophy (while painting Mark's room
this summer). It has helped a lot, since as a math/finance major I
never discussed Plato. Funny to have a PhD without ever taking a
philosophy class!