Remember that dialogue from the Matrix?

The part at the beginning where Morpheus has just called Neo at his office and alerts him to the presence of the Agents pursuing him?

Neo says, "Shit!"
And Morpheus just replies, "Yes."

That pretty much sums up much of my reaction to classes at SANC.

I'm with three other students who have taken 3rd-year Japanese at Yale. Our classes are divided three ways: (1) regular class, which uses a textbook that teaches us vocabulary and grammar through various exercises and essays, (2) business Japanese class, in which we learn, well, business Japanese, for landing a job at a Japanese company and whatnot, and (3) news class, where we read the paper and listen to the radio.

To start, let me say that there is a lot of work. A lot of reading, which entails a lot of writing in the pronunciation and meaning of new kanji--and there are a lot of new kanji--and a fair bit of busywork as far as exercises go. Instead of learning 15 new words for a quiz each day, it seems to be more like 40-50. Except when it's 88, and it's sprung on you at the last second.

While regular class is rather fun, and business Japanese class is okay, if a bit intimidating, newspaper class is boring as hell and really, really difficult. We have it all day on Monday and Thursday. So, we read an article for Monday, and that was tough. We read some more on Monday and listened to the radio, which was annoying. And there are tons of new words. She gave us homework, which was basically to answer questions about the first article and do some grammar exercises. But get this. On Wednesday, after I (and another advanced student) left business Japanese class, the other two advanced students stayed behind, waiting for some of the lower-level kids to get out. And, while they were waiting in the lobby, the news class teacher came rushing in, ever-so-fucking-happy to have found them in time. In time for what, you ask? In time to double our homework load and inform us of a quiz the next day on 88 words for which we had no preparation whatsoever.

I got the call about this while I was on the bus going home. For legal reasons, I cannot transcribe what went through my head in this venue.

I decided to time just how long it took me to do the homework, not including Facebook breaks. The original stuff she assigned took 2 hours. The new stuff took about another 2 more hours. I'm not used to working for more than 1 or 2 hours each night, except to write essays! And I'm a pretty fast worker, so I can only imagine how it is for the others.

The only bright side was that, today, the teacher showed up 45 minutes late for news class. Apparently she misunderstood the schedule, or something. Sadly, it probably won't happen again.