(10/17/2022)
It’s the seventh week of classes and midterms are coming up in the next couple weeks. I’ve seen so many things and experienced so much that it’s impossible to recount it all. But for this post, I’m going to try to focus on classes and studies.
Most classes here are three credits, so I’m taking five classes: two literature classes, a mindfulness class, intro to Cantonese, and a science fiction film classs. Rather than two or three classes a week, most courses have a single, three-hour session, a week (however, my mindfulness class is only two hours/2 credits, and my Cantonese class is split up into a one-hour and a two-hour section, but the rest are three hours). I have to admit that concentrating on classes for three hours is rather difficult, although sometimes professors will let us out early, and usually give a ten-minute break in the middle. Lunch/breakfast is very welcome after my 8:30/9:30ams.
Classes tend to have more lecture component than those that I’m used to in the U.S., although participation is still counted toward the grade in some of my classes.
However, course grades at HKBU (Hong Kong Baptist University) tend to be based on much fewer, but more heavily-weighted, assignments – for one of my classes, for example, the grade is determined by a midterm paper, final paper, a presentation and presentation report and participation.
Okay! So, the presentation! It appears that presentations are a key part of the grades for classes here at HKBU, and my three main academic courses all have an important presentation. For one of my literature classes, I gave a presentation a few weeks back. It was the first presentation of the semester (there is a presentation for every class session for half of the semester), which perhaps wasn’t a wise choice, given I didn’t know anything about how it was expected to be structured. And it was not a one-minute presentation—not two or five or ten. But a fifteen-minute presentation, for each of me and my two partners… so, I’ve now given a fifteen-minute presentation!
The other two presentations are five-minutes long, so around a normal length for presentations back home. I’ve now given two presentations, but I haven’t received any grades yet, so I have to admit I’m a little uncertain about how things – presentations and otherwise – will be graded here, as there were no concrete guidelines about the presentations.
My classes at HKBU are much smaller than I expected, somewhere between twenty and forty students, so larger than most Linfield classes, but nowhere near the size of classes at state schools — I think HKBU has around 10,000 total students.
Talk to you again soon!
Kelsi