Things I learned in college

This week's memory post is a little different. Usually I try to remember everything about something; this time, the structure is more something about everything.

Having graduated from college, I'm going to try to remember something I learned from every class I took. Now, to try to remember everything I learned would be just too much, so I'm just focusing on a few things.


Calculus 1, winter 2010. Math tends to be something I easily forget, and a lot of this was review from high school. But I remember learning that there are practical applications for calculus besides just doing math. For example, if a farmer had limited fencing and wanted to make the largest pen he could out of his materials, he could use calculus to do it. Of course, most farmers haven't taken calculus.

Introduction to Music, winter 2010. I learned about the different periods (Baroque, Classical, Romantic, etc.), and I don't think I had even heard of Haydn before this class. I came to appreciate Handel's Messiah (although the version I ended up buying was not as pretty as the one I heard for class, at least for the "Rejoice greatly" aria).

Book of Mormon 1, winter 2010. I learned about the route some scholars think Lehi followed.

American History through Literature, winter 2010. I read several books I hadn't before: Johnny Tremain, Main Street, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, The House of the Seven Gables. I learned about the Plessy v. Ferguson case (separate but equal), since I had to do a report on it.

Introduction to English Language, winter 2010. I learned about descriptivism, having never considered how arbitrary the rules are. I learned IPA, and I learned how interesting linguistics is.

Intermediate French 1, spring 2010. I learned a lot of French vocabulary, since this was the first French class I had had since high school. I learned acheter (to buy), se souvenir (to remember), ananas (pineapple), and soirée familiale (family home evening).

New Testament 1, spring 2010.  There are questions about the origin of the story of the woman taken in adultery. I learned how important Psalm 22 was to the Jews. The woman with the issue of blood, though usually depicted as sitting on the ground, was probably not on the ground or she would have been trampled. Myrrh is a thorny plant.

Intermediate French 2, summer 2010. The Hunchback of Notre Dame is actually more about Paris. I learned about Descarte's "Je pense, donc je suis."

Dinosaurs, summer 2010. Dinosaurs are the ancestors of birds. I learned about the different kinds of dinosaurs: ceratopsians, theropods, sauropods, etc. I learned how fossils are excavated, and most importantly, I learned how cool fossils were. This class led me to eventually be a geology minor.

Internet Publishing, winter 2011. This was not my favorite class, because our instructor was a grad student who wasn't very good, but I did learn some basics of HTML and CSS.

Astronomy, winter 2011. There are different kinds of solar eclipses and lunar eclipses. You can tell time by the moon, although I've forgotten how to do that (but if I thought about it I might be able to do it). Now I can spot Orion, but I've forgotten most of the other constellations. I also learned about this video:

Grammar of English, winter 2011. Our "eight parts of speech" structure is actually based on Latin; if we were to start from scratch, we would probably organize it differently.

Modern American Usage, winter 2011. The class that really converted me from being a prescriptivist to being a descriptivist. A lot of our grammar "rules" come from the 1600s and 1700s, when scholars tried to apply the rules of Latin grammar to English. The rule about prepositions not ending a sentence is based on Latin. The forbidding of split infinitives is similarly based on Latin, but people only talked about it because it was a new phenomenon and therefore they thought it was wrong. Fun was originally a noun, so some people thought you couldn't add -er or -est to it, even though it is definitely used as an adjective. The Oxford English Dictionary and the Corpus of Contemporary/Historical American English are wonderful resources.

Beginning Piano Techniques 1, winter 2011. I learned the importance of practice. I learned about different keys (as in musical keys, not piano keys), but I'd need a refresher.

History of the English Language, spring 2011. I learned about the different events that shaped English--the Roman Empire's holdings in England in the Pre-English phase; the arrival of Saxons that heralded in Old English, and the later Viking invasions; the Norman Invasion that brought about Middle English; the scholars of the Early Modern English. I used this video for a class presentation:

Masterpieces of American Literature, spring 2011. William Bradford said they had turkeys at the first Thanksgiving (take that, know-it-all historians who say they didn't!). We read A Streetcar Named Desire, and I found mention of Charles Anthon (of Joseph Smith--History fame) while doing research on Edgar Allan Poe.

Civilization to 1500, summer 2011. We read Guns, Germs, and Steel, the Dhammapada, The Rise of Christianity, and a book about the Ottoman Empire. I don't think I knew about the Ottoman Empire before this class, and Guns, Germs, and Steel was very enlightening.

Introduction to Archeology, summer 2011. The origin of cultivated corn is a major mystery to archeologists. Archeologists study arrowheads to try to figure out where Native Americans came from.

English Semantics and Pragmatics, winter 2012. I learned about the Gricean maxims, which means that you can say something indirectly but others can still understand your meaning. I learned about the grammatical structures that indicate presupposition; for example, "Where were you when you saw him?" presupposes that you saw him.

Beginning Piano Techniques 2, winter 2012. I learned how to play "Did You Think to Pray?" with both hands, but I'm out of practice now.

Basic Editing Skills, winter 2012. I learned all the editing guidelines I use for work, thanks to the Chicago Manual of Style. I learned that you use a comma between two independent clauses joined by the FANBOYS conjunctions, but you generally don't use a comma if the subject is not repeated. Thus: "I went to the store, and I went to the beach," but "I went to the store and went to the beach." I don't always care about this rule, though, because I don't think it's overly helpful. I learned to use en dashes in number ranges.

Doctrine and Covenants 1, winter 2012. Martin Harris's wife wasn't happy with his involvement with the Book of Mormon (and understandably so). Some early Saints had some crazy experiences, like one creeping on the ground, saying he was going to preach to the Lamanites, and another one jumping off a cliff but landing in a tree.

Physical Geology, winter 2012. I thought that only historical geology would be interesting, but this class taught me to love the physical aspect, perhaps even more than the historical. Most of the things I know about geology I learned in this class, although they were refined later. I learned about igneous (gabbro, diorite, granite, tuff, rhyolite, andesite, basalt, pumice, obsidian), sedimentary (chalk, rock salt, rock gypsum, sandstone, limestone, dolostone, shale, conglomerate), and metamorphic (gneiss, slate, phyllite, schist, quartzite, marble) rocks. I learned about subduction zones, silicic and basaltic volcanoes, glacial features, and climate change. This was one of the most influential classes of my college career.

Print Publishing, spring 2012. I learned a little about Adobe Illustrator and InDesign. I'm proud of the dinosaur vector I made in Illustrator. I learned a little about design principles, including typography, colors, and alignment.

Civilization from 1500, spring 2012. This was my least favorite of all my classes, but I learned about the beginning of World War I and how that war led to the Great Depression and WWII. I don't think I'd ever heard of Mao Zedong before this class, nor had I heard of fascism (shocking, right?).

Advanced French Grammar, summer 2012. I learned the difference in pronunciation between "u" and "ou." Different French verbs use different prepositions, but you just have to memorize them.

Writings of Isaiah, summer 2012. Snow in ancient Israel was seen as a purifying agent. Isaiah is hard to understand, but understanding the context helps.

Book of Mormon 2, summer 2012. The Book of Mormon does have parallels for our day. Alma's confrontation with Korihor may have been a Church disciplinary council. Some BYU professors actually believe dinosaurs lived recently.

Empirical Methods in English Linguistics, fall 2012. Although linguistics isn't a science, it follows empirical methods for observation and experimentation. There are computer programs that can analyze stylistic structures.

Varieties of English, fall 2012. Most of Canada speaks the same dialect. I'm not good at detecting dialects, but now I am more aware of differences, even if I can't always place an accent. Men and women can speak quite differently.

Substantive Editing (Scholarly Publishing), fall 2012. Headings can really help a paper's organization. Other cultures have different expectations of what goes into a paper; in eastern cultures, the papers often aren't revised, and they just have a stream-of-consciousness approach. The passive construction can aid in clarity.

Environmental Biology, fall 2012. The coiled fluorescent bulbs may do more damage than good. Glass isn't recycled in Utah, so it has to be transported; thus it might do more harm to recycle glass in Utah. Utah uses coal power, so electric cars in Utah aren't that environmentally friendly.

Geomorphology, fall 2012. Death Valley is awesome. Meandering streams form from slow-moving water, while braided streams come from varying amounts of water with lots of sediments.

Jogging, fall 2012.  I learned some stretches and warmups, but I don't use them like I should. We need more carbs than we need protein.

Historical geology, winter 2013. Tufa is a kind of sharp limestone formed from springs. There are different mountain-building events called orogenies, although I didn't understand them as well as I should have. Single-celled organisms were around for billions of years before they became multi-celled. The Devonian Period was the age of fish.

Old Testament 1, winter 2013.  The oath-making "put your hand on my thigh" is euphemistic. Jonathan was a good friend to David.

Geology of planets, winter 2013. Jupiter's moon Io has volcanoes. Saturn's moon Titan is a lot like earth, with lakes of liquid methane. Mars used to have rivers of water, and it has ice just under its surface. (Some of this stuff I learned in geomorphology, because I had the same professor.)

Phonetics and phonology, winter 2013. There is one Native American language with only three speakers, and they don't talk to each other. You can observe speech and make diagrams to analyze under what circumstances a certain phoneme occurs.

Early Modern English, winter 2013. Shakespeare was an amazingly talented writer, because they were taught rigorously back then. When we read old texts, the biggest problem is not in the words we don't recognize, it's in the words that we think we know but that have actually changed meaning.

Editing for publication, spring 2013. Fractions use a hyphen (as in "three-fourths"). I tend to trust authors too much. It never occurred to me that you can download vectors from the internet; I thought you had to make your own.

Structure of English, spring 2013. Knowing the structure of English can help you create jokes and clever slogans. Because of this class, I notice ambiguity and garden-path (misleading) sentences everywhere.

Field studies, fall (pre-fall) 2013. Tufa doesn't necessarily form around plants. Around 600 million years ago, the supercontinent Rodinia broke up, making Utah a beach. One of the cracks allowed the Uinta Mountains to form, which is why they run east to west instead of north to south. Before it broke up, the world was an icehouse earth, and glaciers formed the Mineral Fork Tillite. After the breakup, the beach environment formed the Tintic Quartzite, Ophir Shale, and Maxfield Limestone. During the Jurassic, Utah was covered with sand dunes, creating the Navajo Sandstone. Capitol Reef has seventeen geologic formations, while Zion National Park only has three.

Groundwater, fall 2013. Groundwater takes hundreds to thousands of years to replenish. By knowing the kind of rock, the pressure, and the amount of water, hydrogeologists can calculate how fast groundwater flows. Geologists can determine the pressure by drilling wells. I didn't learn as much in groundwater as I would have liked to.

Swimming for Non-Swimmers, fall 2013. I learned how to do the freestyle, breastroke, and backstroke. But I can't do the butterfly, even though I know what it looks like.

The Senior Course (corpus linguistics), fall 2013. I learned how to use Mark Davies's corpora, from Mark Davies himself. I use them all the time in editing. From some of my projects, I learned that discussions of chastity have decreased in general conference talks since the 1980s, except for discussions of pornography. Uses of the term "dinosaur" and "fossil" increased dramatically in the 1990s, probably because of Jurassic Park.

Old English 1, fall 2013. Old English had a lot more inflections than today's English. "Neorxnawange" is a word for "paradise" that has no known etymology. "Wyrm" could mean worm, snake, dragon, or pus.

Technical Communications, fall 2013. Some college students are surprisingly bad writers. From my own project, I learned that Chrome is slightly the best browser, but not enough for me to quit using Firefox. When you create instructions, you should split the steps up so that there's not more than seven steps per section.

Beginning Weight Training, winter 2014. When doing squats, your knees should not go in. Weight machines work out fewer muscles than free weights do.

Advanced French Part 2, winter 2014. Words ending in "ait" or "ais" make a different vowel than those ending in "ai." I learned a fair amount of vocabulary, including "carotte de glace," meaning ice core, or literally "carrot of ice."

The Publishing Industry, winter 2014. Agents help authors get their books published. The requirements for publishers vary. Don't try to sell your book to Covenant, because they try to take away all your rights. The nonfiction world is easier to get into than the fiction world (which works well for me).

Geology Seminar, winter 2014. The Yellowstone magma chamber may actually be cooling down. Our ideas about the formation of mudstones under water might not be quite true.

Academic Internship, fall 2013, winter 2014. My internships provided me with valuable experience. I learned that if often pays to do a little research on the topic you are editing.

Editing student journals, winter 2012, winter 2014. A lot of aspiring editors aren't very good and/or are overzealous. Copyfitting isn't too difficult.

I hope that I will keep learning, even though I'm out of college.