Class schedule

I'm two weeks into school, and haven't flunked out yet. Booyah! Only had to turn in one assignment so far, and I don't think the teacher will read that, so the academics thus far are pretty easy.
Here's a run down of the classes I have:
1) Fundamentals of music - 3 hours
This class goes through a history/theory of church music, and then for one hour per week we have musical practicum, i.e. what is a staff, a clef, a note, an interval, a piano, etc etc etc. The teacher said he would want to rename the class "Orthodox Liturgical Ethos: Piety and Practice" because we spend so much time talking about the ethos of the Divine Services.

2) Liturgics - Both Russian (3 hours) and Antiochian (1 hour--zero credit class--required for Antiochian students only). So far, we've learned how to properly bow, and at what times we should hold the divine services. Uh huh.

3) Foundations of Dogmatic Theology (3 hours)
This class will be pretty interesting. The teacher blitzes through his lectures, so note-taking is a pretty good work out. But the gems are there. Para exemplar: "We are not theologians. The church only has 3 saints who are theologians (John the evangelist, Gregory the theologian, Symeon the new theologian), so we are students of theology." And: "Theology is not to be studied; it's to be lived." Oh, and the tests are oral--one on one with the teacher. Don't know if that's good or bad.

4) Early Church History (3 hours). Start with the Apostles and go through the first 600 years or so of the church. Not too bad.

5) Israel's Origins (3 hours). This is taught by Fr. Michael Dahulich and is about the first 5 books of the Old Testament. The focus is the origin of the Hebrew people and their relationship with God.

6) Spirituality (3 hours, in a row, on a Tuesday afternoon (the longest class day)). Your guess is as good as mine as to what we'll be studying. Umm, something spiritual. We've had this class twice, and one guy compared it to the TV show Lost: "Lost always leaves you with more questions than answers, and rarely resolves the questions that it asks. It actually gets annoying. That's how I feel about this class. We have so many questions that I don't know if we'll get answers before the semester is over."

7) Choir (0 credit, but meet 2 hours a week). It is a choir class. The entire student body comes and sings so we can be the choir at all the services.

8) New Testament Greek (2 hours). Fortunately, we're using Modern Greek pronunciations, so that made my first week easy after taking Ellynika (greek) for three years in high school. But this class was cut from three hours to two hours, and is only one semester, so the teacher is trying to cram too much info into too short of a class. He talks fast. No joke. I think his mind operates on rocket fuel.

9) Arabic (0 credit hours, meet 2 hours a week) Required for Antiochian students, this class is supposed to teach us Arabic. First class meeting is one hour from now (that would be 9:30am NEPA time, not 5:30 am, for those of you who think I post these messages at 5am, pshaw. You should know me better than that)

So there you go. 20 official credit hours, plus another 5 non-credit hours, plus a weekend parish assignment, plus maintaining a blog, plus trying to follow sports, plus plus plus. I think I need some rocket fuel for my brain.

In other news, the Houston Astros are this year's version of the Colorado Rockies. Check out ESPN.com for more info.