New Classes

It's the first day of winter quarter! Today I had Chemistry, Math, and my Intro to Humanities class: Ultimate Meanings. Math and Chemistry were as expected, but IHUM was surprisingly hilarious. Our teacher is a really old guy from NOT Australia (I'm guessing New Zealand from his accent, but he never did tell us...). He started class by telling us Brother's Grimm story, click HERE to read it. He also told us another story, this one about the class and how he was duped into teaching it because he's fairly new on staff (IHUM is dreaded by both teachers and students because it's a required class that mostly is terrible). Overall it was pretty hilarious, and he optimistically suggested that the class might actually be fun. Hopefully my first Anthro lecture tomorrow is half as entertaining.

List of classes and descriptions follow below:

MATH 19: Calculus

Introduction to differential calculus of functions of one variable. Topics: review of elementary functions including exponentials and logarithms, limits, rates of change, the derivative, and applications. Math 19, 20, and 21 cover the same material as Math 41 and 42, but in three quarters rather than two. Prerequisites: precalculus, including trigonometry, advanced algebra, and analysis of elementary functions.

IHUM 73A: Ultimate Meanings: Decoding Religious Stories from around the World

Is there more to life than survival, or does it have some higher purpose? Why is there suffering, death, and evil in the world, and is there some way to overcome them? Religious communities often answer such questions through the art of story-telling, through history, myth, biography and other forms of distilling human experience into narrative. These stories have shaped the world we live in, helping people to cope with difficult aspects of experience, influencing the way we love, suffer and die, inspiring the imagination, and helping to ignite conflict and violence.\nThis course introduces you to some of the great stories of the world's religions, the sacred narratives of Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. We will read these stories to learn something about the religious cultures that produced them, and how they have shaped human experience.\nIn the winter quarter, students will be introduced to stories drawn primarily from the Buddhist tradition in the many forms which it developed as it spread across Asia from India to Japan and beyond. We will look at the biography of the founder, the Buddha, the tales of his previous lives, the stories of his disciples, and of later saints and heroes, religious practitioners and ordinary folk. Students will learn to read these stories to see how they elaborate a persuasively constructed world of meaning in terms of which people can make sense of their own personal histories.\nIn the spring quarter, the focus will shift to the foundational narratives of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the stories of the Israelites exodus from Egypt, the suffering Job, the life and death of Jesus and the calling of the prophet Muhammad. Do these stories have only one meaning, and who determines what that meaning is? Can a story's meaning change over time, and if so, what do such stories mean today, in a partially secularized culture very different from the ones that produced them? We will address these questions by exploring how these ancient stories have been re-imagined by recent thinkers and writers who can help us understand how their meaning has changed, or is changing, in the light of modern experience.

ANTHRO 1: Introduction to Cultural and Social Anthropology (ANTHRO 201)

Crosscultural anthropological perspectives on human behavior, including cultural transmission, social organization, sex and gender, culture change, technology, war, ritual, and related topics. Case studies illustrating the principles of the cultural process. Films.

CHEM 31B: Chemical Principles II

Chemical equilibrium; acids and bases; oxidation and reduction reactions; chemical thermodynamics; kinetics. Lab.