At first I was afraid, I was petrified. Actually, that's not true. First I was looking forward to this class. I can get engulfed reading maps and studying geography. I love just starring at maps. Oh, and I can name all the countries, by the way. So I thought a geography class was going to be easy. But, I was way off base, at first.

The class was not on cartography, but on physical geography, mostly focused on water in the United States and Bulgaria. It was an Honors class, and those were the regions our professor, Dr. C. Gregory Knight, was renowned for. I was afraid the class was going to be a nightmare, but actually, it ended up being one of my favorite classes.

Being the Honors section, we only had 14 students in the class. So the curriculum was based around discussions, not lectures. We talked to Dr. Knight as much as he talked to us. We created an excellent chemistry and learning environment in the class. Although I was not familiar with any of the material we were covering, the class was taught in a way that I found it easy to pick up the information.

In addition to our tri-weekly class discussions, we had three major assignments. Two of those were tests and one was a semester long research presentation. Due to scheduling problems, the tests were take home short essay tests (Boy, was I lucky! They would have been killer if we had to take them in class, even if they were open book! Each test took me about 7 hours to complete, but I got above a 95% on each one!). My semester long research project was on the water resources in the Great Lakes region. I spent the semester contacting various marine organization in that region requesting information. Finally during the last week of class I gave my PowerPoint presentation to the class.

My favorite thing about the class was how tight knit we were. That was possible because the class was so small. Even though most of the students in the class were graduating seniors that just needed to fulfill their science requirements, the class mixture was still nice. As an added bonus, Dr. Knight invited all of us to his house one night for dinner. It was a great experience. His wife prepared some dishes from her native country, Bulgaria, and we prepared pizzas we unique toppings, as selected by Dr. Knight.

All in all I am glad that I stuck with the class. I was afraid that it was going to be torture, but it ended up being a blast every day. And unlike many other classes I took, from this discussion based class I actually remember a great deal of the material, which only proves the fact that small conversational classes work much better than the old lecture based ones.

Class grade received: A

Classwork:

Water Resources in the Great Lakes Region
The culminating presentation from a semester long research project on the water resources in the region around the Great Lakes.

About Me | Portfolio | Résumé | Sounds and Multimedia | Pictures
Scheduled Tasks | Read Me First Before Setup | Contact Information | And More . . .

©2002 by Ben Eisenberg. All content is the propery of its respective owners.
Please read the disclosure, privacy, and copyright policy.
Please refer all questions to the site's content manager and webmaster.