The main difference is in the name - here I don't go to lectures or seminars, but I take classes. We all sit at individual desks whilst the professor might lecture for an hour, or explain things and then ask questions, or simply sit back and let us do the talking; that really depends on the professor.
For example, I am taking four classes: American Literature 1, Twentieth Century American Literature, Adolescent Literature and Creative Writing. In American Lit 1, our professor prefers to mostly lecture and only occasionally put questions to the class. I enjoy this because it's similar to Keele and right in my comfort zone!
In Adolescent Literature, our professor prefers to have us talk amongst ourselves. Every week, a different student teaches the class about the text, and that is part of our assessment. Sometimes he plays devil's advocate and says purposefully controversial things so that we will argue with each other. This class focuses a lot on the personal experience of Literature, and how young adult readers should be able to identify with a text. At first I was shamefully sceptical of this approach, and my textbook still has several cross annotations in, but now I know that form and technique are not the only important things to notice.
In Twentieth Century Lit there is more of a compromise between lecture and class discussion. Our professor sets us questions which we discuss together, but if the class is having a slow day he is happy to lecture instead. Creative Writing is a whole other ballgame so I won't go into too much detail, except to say that I'm glad my wild card choice paid off.
Although I take a lot of notes in class and there is a lot to learn, the different format felt strange to me at first, like I might not be learning anything if it doesn't come from the professor's mouth! Now I realise that there's no use being snobbish about it; there's plenty to learn from my classmates - and the huge amount of stuff I had to memorise for the midterm exams definitely proved me wrong!
My four classes take me up to 12 contact hours a week. This is the minimum number of contact hours, though many local students take more. For a Literature student, this might sound like a lot of classtime! In my first year at Keele I had 8 contact hours per week. At Keele we needed a lot of self-study time to get all the reading done, but here I think students are afforded more classtime by the format: we have homework assignments every week, typically to read a chapter of a book, or an essay. This might not sound like very much, but with four classes it does mount up.
Continuous assessment is more stressful in some ways, because the work seems never ending! As soon as you get one thing done, there is something else on the cards! But I think this has basically taught me better time management. In some ways, continuous assessment is also fairer, because it means that, if you're ill or something on the day of the final exam, you haven't messed up your whole year if the exam doesn't go well.
Apologies for the block of text! Here are some photos I took in D.C.
The White House :)
Dorothy's real Ruby Slippers at the National Museum of American History!
And the Smithsonian castle.
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