Monday, August 28, 2006

Wheeee!

Yippee! After weeks of struggling with beaurocracy, red tape, time difference, and so forth, I finally have a schedule for my classes for the coming year. I am taking classes in contract law, criminal law, and tort law (as best I can translate them), and one on different systems of justice. I also have a class on sects of Judaism in the Second Temple Era, picked more or less at random from among the Jewish class requirements.

Doesn't seem like so much, does it? I mean, I have only 22 hours of class a week. I feel as if I either have forgotten to sign up for some kind of class, or else they're really going easy on us in the first semester. Already, my second semester is much busier. But all of the free time is tempting me to maybe apply for a minor.... maybe in Talmud or something?....I shall have to think on this...

5 comments:

Richard said...

what do you mean, only 22 hours of class a week? At least in America, it's about 4 hours of homework per hour of class, with a full load at most colleges about 14 credit hours, absolute max at ~18. Be sure to invite me to the funeral!

Looking Forward said...

my perents are very hesitant about letting me take that many hours, even though evidently i can handle it no problem.

congradulations tobie, I hope you succeed and do very well!

Irina Tsukerman said...

That sounds remarkably like MY schedule - except I'm taking property instead of tort, plus Legal Writing. It'll be interesting to compare the different systems of education. And whether they are THAT different...

Tobie said...

Well, compared to what I was expecting and what I'll probably get in later semesters, this isn't bad at all. Also, I don't think there's quite as much homework in Israeli programs and it's pretty accepted to ditch classes that you don't need to attend. I know that this is a lot more hours than I had at U of C, but I wasted a lot of time there. Hopefully the fuller schedule will keep me busy without making me insane.

And it wasn't like I picked this schedule- the law program for first years is a pre-assigned set of classes. The only thing that I chose was my Jewish class, plus I chose a history of law class over "Basic Economics for Lawyers" (I know, I forgot to mention that one).
In the end, however, I have chosen not to do a minor, because there's an option after the first year to join a special program that'll let me get an LLM after 4 years. Since the LLB is already 3.5 years, it's totally worthwhile to do so.

Irina- I feel like my schooling is very similar to an American law school and is therefore going to be quite different from my American undergraduate experience.

Anonymous said...

Talking from what friends have told me, I'm guessing they five less homework. israeli's don't seem to get much homework. I've discovered that it seems that most Israeli's can't touchtype in hebrew (I sort of can...I taught myself :) ).

So don't worry about the homework. I can't imagine how my friends manages to do things like be married or do art if they didn't have less homework.

Besides, without so many credit hours, how else would you explain the 3 year degree.

Plus Israeli's tend to be more serious about getting in and out of college. Most students don't live in the dorms (Ahem....cough*anglo*cough)and most studetns are post Army- which seems to make them slightly more serious (A 21 year old as a freshman is going to be much different than an 18 year old)

So I'm not too worried about you.

can you send me notes about Second temp-le period Judaims. I think it would be really important in talks about how the Mishna and Gemara developed (Particularly early sedarim of the Mishna...)