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My classes

My Spanish literature class is really funny. My teacher is a visiting professor from Buena Vista University in Iowa. All our stories that we have to read are about death or pain or suffering. Isn't that how all literature classes are? It's really very fun though. It combines my need to read good books with homework, I always feel energized after class.

My Spanish phonology class is interesting too. My professor is from England, and learned to speak Spanish in Spain. So when he speaks Spanish, he's hard to understand, and when he speaks English it's almost impossible to understand, mostly because it sounds like it should be a foreign language, but it's not Spanish. Last semester I took a linguistics class from the man who wrote this semester's textbook, so I feel like I've learned it all before. And it's my third class so far that has discussed phonetics and phonology. I feel like I have a very nice head start in the class.

Sociology is not quite what I expected it to be, but I still enjoy it a lot. Our first assignment for the class is to take a small survey and do some statistical analysis afterward. I've never seen most of what I'm supposed to do with the numbers I come up with. Math is the only foreign language that I am afraid to learn. I haven't taken a math class since my junior year of high school, and I never took any statistics. Don't tell anyone, but I'm almost excited to try some math. I got into the class thinking that we would talk about lots of sociological theory at first, but we're diving right into statistics. Oh well.

My religion classes really aren't quite as bad as I made them out to be in my last post. My teachers are both very energetic, and they know a lot about what they teach. I just wonder if the tests will be harder than final judgment. My guess based on past experience is that the tests will be more difficult than any previous religion test. I think that religion professors have contests to see who can fail more students per semester. That's what gets on my nerves mostly. I don't hate religion, and I don't resent having a religious education required at BYU. I just hate how hard the professors have to make it.

That's a rough synopsis of my semester so far. I apologize that I don't have the time to write every detail of just how cool my Spanish classes are. I really wish that everyone I know could experience them the same way I do, but it's just not possible. Maybe someday when everyone has experienced everything, we can discuss it, and it will only take a few words.

New Semester

This semester I'm taking five classes: Doctrine and Covenants, Living Prophets, Spanish Phonetics and Phonology, Spanish Literature, and Sociology.

My plan is this: If I take two religion classes, one of them will be my least enjoyable class by default. It just has to be. Religion has always been the worst part of my BYU experience. And the other will be tolerable when I compare it with the first. And this way I might enjoy a religion class before I graduate. Good plan?

I think I've already decided which of my two religion classes will be Satan's tool in making me hate Mormonism. (Well, not really.) In my syllabus for Living Prophets, I have an average of 12 conference talks per day to read, in addition to one or two chapters from the text. Not cool. That will take me at least three hours to complete. It takes the general authorities two full sessions of conference to deliver the addresses I have to read. I also have to take notes in my Ensign, and I'm graded on how much I write in the margins. I actually have to turn in my Ensign at the end of the semester.

I have other classes. If I plan on graduating with a degree other than religious education, I will not be able to do all the reading for this class. It's unreasonable. I can't spend all my time reading talks and expect to have time to do my other homework. I know that religion is important, and that it should be a high priority in my life. But seriously, I'm trying to get an education, and BYU keeps getting in the way.

Bush Scandals You May Have Missed

To the extent that media attention is given to the sins of the Bush administration, it is to the more conspicuous that airtime and newspaper space tends to be devoted, unhappily to the exclusion of other stories of official malfeasance or nonfeasance.

Among the recent examples that deserve more attention than they have gotten:

* A Washington Post story about how Bush political appointees had ordered a Justice Department lawyer to weaken a case against the tobacco industry.

* A New York Times story about how IRS agents are pressed to close corporate tax cases prematurely, "allowing billions in tax dollars to go unpaid."

* An Associated Press article relating that FDA food inspections declined by 47 percent between 2003 and 2006.

* Another Post story about how the FDA is allowing antibiotics to be used in animals, a practice that can ultimately cause the development of human resistance to those drugs. This has already happened to a drug given to poultry that was effective against anthrax and serious forms of diarrhea, but to which humans have developed immunity by eating poultry products.

* A Times story about how the Bush administration has let an industry lobbyist "edit government climate reports to play up uncertainty about a human role in global warming, or play down evidence of such a role."

* Still another Times story describing how the IRS is "asking tax lawyers and accountants who create tax shelters and loopholes to take the lead in writing some of its new tax rules." The article quotes Paul Light, a professor of political science at NYU: "It's the fox designing the henhouse."

Charles Peters is the founding editor of the Washington Monthly and the president of Understanding Government, a nonprofit dedicated to better government through better reporting.

Source Citation: Peters, Charles. "Bush scandals you may have missed.(Tilting at windmills)(President George W. Bush)(Brief article)." Washington Monthly 39.5 (May 2007): 8(2). Academic OneFile. Thomson Gale. Brigham Young University - Utah. 8 Aug. 2007
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