The brave new world of Intersession

It's Opening Day today for the university's (relatively) new offering: two-week Intersession classes, wedged between New Year's Day and MLK Day. I'm teaching Foundations of Media Studies (COMM 229) online, a class I feel most comfortable trying out in this accelerated format.

"Accelerated" is kind of under-selling it. I mean, I prefer to spread out my summer classes across both sessions, for a 10-week class. This way, it's a little more rapid than the 14-week semester, but not as condensed as the 5-week flavor.

But now take each of those ten summer school weeks of COMM 229, and make each of them a day. Now put the petal to the metal for ten days, and you've got yourself an Intersession class.

Dear Lord.

Inevitably, some things need to change--for instance, weekly (would-be daily) screenings have been sacrificed in favor of recommending we talk about Boyhood (2014) as something of a case-study of key concepts. And besides, it's kind of fun to make a pedagogical bet that this one will win the Best Picture Oscar this spring... 

Gusties (and other fellow travelers) are familiar with the January Term ("J-Term"!) in which you'd take a single class for the month--the idea being that you could explore something outside your major while having a different kind of rhythm on campus. By definition, J-Term classes could not count towards other requirements--it was its own requirement, as I remember. So when several friends and I took Television Criticism, it was because it seemed like a cool idea--not a way to chip away at the dreaded Speech-Comm major. Of course, a lot of people thought it was a lark to be able to watch TV for college credit...until they really got their heads around the readings and such.

So let's see how this works--maybe in 25 years' time, someone will think back on this class, the way I'm remembering Gustavus in January 1988...