No, I haven't changed my degree program. I am still booking along toward my master's degree in rhetoric and composition. My schedule for fall includes Enlightenment Rhetoric and Writing and Research Methodology. I am hoping to present on using positive discipline in college pedagogy at a conference, and I am planning a paper on classical rhetoric in Ender's Game. I am right on track with all that English department goodness.
But, I am also signed up for Intro to Anthropology. It doesn't have one bit to do with my degree. It has nothing to do with my academic background. It's just fun.
Every semester, I try to take a class just for fun, a class that I am interested in for it's own sake, a class that is new and exciting. I like to take languages; my last semester fun class was Latin. This semester, I also considered a math class and Ancient Hebrew.
I consider learning different and exciting subjects as one of the great benefits of being in a university setting for most of my week. Everywhere I go, there are professors and students who are engrossed in studying subjects I know nothing about. The library is full of books about things I never imagined. The schedule is packed with courses I would love to take, majors I would love to have, if only I had all the time in the world.
The cool thing is that right now I do have a lot of time. I definitely have time for the workload of one undergraduate course. And for that little bit of extra time I put in, I get the feeling of branching out, of integrating far flung subjects into my mental picture of the world. I get the excitement of learning the basics of a new subject. I get the chance to be a wanderer in the university, not a provincial citizen of one department, but a globe-trotter.
