Tuesday, July 4, 2006
6:41:00 PM CDT
I'm taking a special Interior Design Studio course that meets for five weeks on Fridays from 8 am-7 pm. It's a collaborative class that has five undergrad and five grad students from each of the three disciplines in the School of Building Arts: Architecture, Interior Design and Historic Preservation. We're working in conjunction with the Coastal Region Habitat for Humanity affiliate office which received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to create a book of prototype Habitat house models (floorplans) that could be used on a national level for areas that have historic neighborhoods that Habitat would like to build in but need to meet the historic design guidelines. So, yea, in five weeks we're supposed to be able to publish a pattern book of house plans.
We were broken into teams with one under grad and one grad student from each discipline within the first few minutes of our first class meeting and I happened to be put in the group with the Pain In The Ass (PITA) of the class. Within the first five minutes of our group working together I could tell that he thought he was going to walk all over everyone and be the boss. He has, quite possibly, the deepest, most booming, loudest voice I've ever heard. Barry White has nothing on this guy. And he doesn't listen (mostly because you can't listen and talk at the same time and he won't quit talking over people). Anyway, by lunch time of the first day he and I had clashed too many times to count and the other four members of our group would just sit back and watch the verbal sparring and shake their heads at him. By the end of the day three of my teammates told me they were glad I was in the group because they were afraid of PITA in the beginning but not now because I had included them in the group and not let him take over. Pace 1 PITA 0.
So far, here's what I know about this class:
I don't think the three professors had met together before the first day of class to create a plan of action. They bluffed their way through the first day by looking at each other and having side bar discussions when questions were asked. I know bluffing when I see it. I've done it plenty of times before. You can't bluff a bluffer.
The second thing I know about this class is that the work load is going to be a killer. Basically, every Friday that we meet is the equilivant of four class meetings and that's how much homework we get at the end of the day on Fridays. We get our "charge" for the week which would take a normal person two-three weeks to produce results. But, because we're SuperStudents and can leap tall buildings in a single bound and shake drawings out of our sleeves, they SuperSize our homework.
The third thing I know about this class is that one professor in particular loves to use big words. I really like the professors of this class and the architecture professor totally cracks me up with his appearance (he's very cute, wears stylish/designery glasses, only wears bow ties, his pants are pulled up to his armpits, and his hair is coiffed into a bit of a spikey point in the middle of his head...now that you have a mental picture of a dork, think again. Somehow it all works for him. I've tried and tried to pinpoint who I assoiciate his appearance with, but I cannot quite put my finger on it. Give me time). It's this same professor that likes to use long, long, long descriptive sentences with big, designer words to get his point across. I've found the students here have been trained to do the same. I'm going to have to pull out the big words to keep up.
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