After a thoroughly enjoyable break at home with friends and family in the familiar chill of England, my return to the US has left me feeling tired from jetlag but also excited for the quarter ahead. I’m very much eager to be exposed to Agnew’s take on Political Geography and Geopolitics and also Professor Lettenmaier’s approach to teaching principles of hydrology.
Firstly in this post I’d like to share my results from my first quarter at UCLA. I did amazingly well achieving A’s in all three classes I took, giving me a 4.0 average GPA, the highest average one can possibly achieve. Although it wont hold significance for my degree, I wish to build on my excellent results and keep my average as high as possible as it means a lot to me to thrive and succeed academically. In the three days I have been back in the United States, I have been exposed to the very first meeting of each class I am due to take this quarter. I shall discuss my very early impressions in this blog entry.
My very first class was ‘Spanish 25: Advanced conversation and composition’, the successor to Spanish 5 I took the previous quarter. The high expectations from the teacher were made clear early on. This course has a strong emphasis on Latin American culture, which personally I find very interesting. Linguistically however this will prove to be challenging, as it requires thorough analysis of literature and interpretation of linguistic devices in Spanish. Poems, sociological essays, book extracts, ancient scriptures and art from the likes of Frida Kahlo are the basis of this course. It is likely to develop my Spanish, the main purpose of me choosing this class. It will be interesting if it improves the array of vocabulary that will be useful in business contexts, an important aspect of the language that needs to be mastered for using the language in a graduate job. The UCL CLIE provides an array of Spanish classes that emphasise Latin American culture, but also provide classes that focus on vocabulary specific to certain professions, a very useful aspect which isn’t replicated here at UCLA. It is my intention therefore to improve my language as much as possible using the courses provided here, becoming more culturally aware of Spanish and Latin American historical past before returning to the UK and focussing on a certain profession in which I wish to become engrossed in.
Yesterday, I attended my first classes for political geography and hydrology and some initial observations were taken. Like with political geography classes in the UK a segment of the course focuses on the ‘historical canon’ (Agnew, 2011) analysing the work of important naturalist political geographers such as Halford Mackinder and Ratzel. The most interesting observation made was the emphasis to which Agnew was lecturing on the political geography of the US, using examples such as the electoral results of 2008 and poverty in Los Angeles as examples to inform the theoretical perspectives (Kousser, 2008). It will be fascinating to see how this class evolves with time and to have insight into how political geography plays a role at the nation, state and local scale in the United States. Furthermore, in his first class he stressed the flaws of International Relations as a theory, with the assumptions that all bounded states are the same and neglecting analysis of power relations being the fundamental flaws, just as he outlined in the important compulsory reading in last years geopolitics class (Agnew, 1994).
As I entered my first hydrology class with Professor Lettenmaier, he stated to the class that we would be his ‘guinnea pigs’. As a newly hired professor at UCLA, thanks to the recommendation made by our own professor at UCL, Professor Taylor. Initial impressions of this class tell me that it is going to be a challenging one, however I believe it is going to be of much more practical use than classes I have taken previously. Rather than emphasise conceptual ideas of hydrology which I already have a good basic knowledge thanks to the 2nd year Hydroclimatology class, this one appears more statistics based and what one does with hydrological data acquired from sources such as the US geological society. This more practical way of teaching hydrology should be really resourceful for my dissertation in which is based fundamentally on secondary hydrological data.
In two weeks time I shall have a better impression of these classes and hopefully a few more interesting observations to analyse between the ways geography is taught in the US and UK.
Agnew, J. (1994). ‘The Territorial Trap: The Geographical Assumptions of International Relations Theory,’ Review of International Political Economy, 1, 1: 53-80.
Agnew, J. (2012) Making Political Geography, Maryland: Rowman and Littlfield.
Kousser, T. (2009) ‘How geopolitics cleaved California’s republicans and united its Democrats’ California Journal of Politics and Policy, 1, 141-73.
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