Susan Bonifer, PhD is everything I’ve been told about her and more. I walked into her class yesterday and she was simply excellent. I’m looking forward to a fun but demanding semester. It’s Communications 204 and we’re going to be doing a lot of public speaking in front of the entire class. We got paired up yesterday to learn about ourselves, then introduce ourselves to the class. I got paired up with a former colleague at the library — Elizabeth — and when she introduced me, she said ‘He doesn’t talk much,’ and Dr Bonifer said,’We’ll work on him.’ The class cackled.

That incident, and the fact that she couldn’t pronounce my surname(s) properly have gotten me more attention than I wanted. I guess I’m going to overcome my fear of public speaking. I’ve heard she’s tough, but I like tough people — at least I won’t complain of being bored when I’m reading in a frenzy and practicing my speeches.

Economics class was interesting. On the pretest we had to know the population of the United States, its inflation rate, it’s GDP, unemployment rate… gosh! When it comes to precision I hate cramming. When it came to the discussions about utility, cost and so on, that was more my turf. Oh dear, this looks like I’m going to be doing some excessive cramming of facts and figures this semester. Luckily, this is a substitute teacher and the main one is joining us on Monday — I hope he’s more interesting.

I’ve got two Chinese professors for Computer Science. Dr Qian is one great lady [I remembered talking to her in Spring to see if I could get her to give me some placement tests to skip the rudimentary Computer Science courses, although this is the first time I've ever had her]. Her huge, thick glasses almost make her look comical but she does exude authority and its fun learning from her.

Dr Wang on the other hand is what we in Fedacad used to call girrilized. One minute he’s talking in a whisper — the next his voice is super loud. His accent didn’t help any and even though I sat in the front row I only picked out five sentences or six. The funny thing was he kept rambling on and on even past the time for the period and when we told him, he just stood there with this ‘girrilized’ grin on his face.

My suite-mate Blake looked like he was about to die. ‘I’ve got him for two courses this semester,’ he told me mournfully. When I asked Khashif about him, he laughed in his bubbly way. ‘I told you — you’re gonna take a long time to get used to his class.’