First Week of Classes

The graduate classes started meeting last week. I have two, one on Monday and one on Wednesday. Each one meets once a week for three hours, 6:30-9:30 p.m. There is a 30-minute break at 7:30 for Maghrib prayers.

So far, they are completely similar to master's classes at UF. One difference here is that they group the master's students according to their semester of study. So the Monday class is the fourth-semester students, who are close to finishing. The course is new communication technologies. The Wednesday class is first-semester students; they are just beginning. I have them for mass comm. theory.

The biggest problem is that the students have no textbooks. I did not realize that it would take several weeks to get them. I wish I had known to order them months ago. In the meantime, we are making due with photocopies in the theory course. In the technologies class, all I have is an e-book, and I can't print from it, so we don't even have photocopies.

Classrooms are very nice, modern and well-equipped. Unlike our classrooms at home, here it is not a problem to get an LCD projector in the classroom.

Other than teaching, last week I spent a lot of time exploring Shah Alam on my motorbike! There are a lot of roundabouts, but unlike the roundabouts in Britain, these don't always have clear signage. (Or at least, the signs are not always clear to me. Almost all of them point to Klang, which is outside Shah Alam, but if I go in that direction, the road does not take me out of town.) Luckily, I have a good map of the area, and anyway, everything connects to everything else. So if I ride around in circles long enough, I always seem to come back to the same place.

We drive on the left here, but that has not been much of an adjustment -- except when reading the map. At first I was always thinking I could go to the right in a roundabout. Then out on the road, that's not the case, and I wouldn't know which left to take to get where I wanted to go. I'm not kidding when I say I'm riding around in circles! But it's pretty easy to get around, and gradually I'm learning where things are. Now I count the lefts on the map and hold them in mind when I'm trying to get to a specific destination.