Hi guys,

I'm trying to get my average up in the summer, and not being good with anything to do with numbers, I'm taking some easy courses.

BUT, I can't decide. I'm taking Anthro 1Z03 with Slonim in second term, and first term Ling 1A03 (with Thomas) and Socio 1A06 (with Neiterman) conflict. I feel like socio might be better for be, because I took Psych 2H03 and I absolutely hated the linguistics part of that, but Ling 1A03's supposed to be easy.

Has anyone had any of these profs before? Is the class material interesting, or does the class get boring (because I'm commuting from Brampton; if the class is pointless I'm just not going to go)? Are these courses bird courses? Typically in the summer are there assignments?

Any input's appreciated Thanks

I've taken Linguistics 1A03, not with Thomas by with Dr. Moro. Amazing prof, amazing course, loved every second of it.

The assignments are easy, barely took me longer than 5 minutes each week. You just have to stay on top of memorizing the IPA symbols and stuff, and you should be good. Of course, some of the morphology problems might be tricky, but once you grasp the gist of how to deal with them, they're just another apply-and-solve.

I do say the course is easy, but the averages for the exams were still ~65% (midterm and final), so if you don't enjoy the subject, think a bit more about it before taking it. Good luck!

I would definitely take Linguistics 1A03 & 1AA3. I personally liked 1AA3 more, simply because I'm a syntax guy, but both courses were great. I can't speak for the prof, but the assignments are easy to do well on, the midterm and exam for both courses weren't difficult to do well on if you studied and knew the material. There's not a whole ton to know for linguistics -- I find that it's more like math in the sense that you know major concepts and apply them, as opposed to blindly memorizing an exorbitant amount of facts or having to write essays.

I liked the courses so much that I've decided to pursue a minor in linguistics, so then again I may be biased. I also tend to find sociology kind of boring, but I've heard it's easy. Therefore, either would probably be good choices.

Ling 1A03 is incredible in my opinion, but I can also understand why some people could find it overwhelmingly painful. It all depends on what you like. If you hated the ling part of Psych 2H03 then you may not like Ling 1A03. On the other hand, it is pretty easy. I just had Dr. Thomas for the second half of 1AA3 and he was pretty good although sometimes I found it hard to figure out what he wanted from us.

Dr Thomas is funny in lecture and it makes for an amusing hour [or, I guess 3 hours for you?]
But sometimes I lost track of what he was actually talking about material-wise. But, I think it was the content rather than him [I still don't really understand that part of the material!]

Both courses are interesting and Ling does have lots of assignments [at least in Fall term] but they are incredibly simple to do [again, I usually did them in the hour before my tutorial and it took me 5-10 minutes.]

Sociology was a little boring, is all. But, that was just me

Originally Posted by _Mike

I liked the courses so much that I've decided to pursue a minor in linguistics, so then again I may be biased. I also tend to find sociology kind of boring, but I've heard it's easy. Therefore, either would probably be good choices.

That's exactly me, too! Well, that was the original plan, but I dunno, depends on the program I take next year and which interest wins out (it's a three-way battle between Linguistics, English and Maths).

And I wouldn't consider the linguistics section of Psych 2H03 to be in any way representative of the first-year linguistics courses. They are both very applied. In 1A03, you have to memorize the IPA, but then it is all application (transcribing words, etc.), and you get phonology and morphology problems but they are all very similar and just require a bit of practice. In 1AA3, you learn various structural rules and various principles and use them to build syntactic trees.

In 2H03, all we did was generally learn what the different areas of linguistics are, learn a bit about phonemes, and different levels of representation of language. If anything, 2H03 is a taste of the psycholinguistics course. I wouldn't worry too much about it.

I had Professor Neiterman for sociology 1A06. She is a great professor and the course is fairly easy you have to be good with writing but since its first year, marking is fair so i would suggest take this course. You have one midterm and one exam and 2 write up assignments and tutorial plus use of iclicker in class that is marked. midterm is at the end of first term and final at the end of second term. You can take it as two midterms or two final because you are only tested on the material of the single term so first test will test on first term material and second one from second term material. so its easy that way.

Hope it helps
Take Care

I've only taken sociology 1a06 in the summer with a different prof. I loved the course; interesting content and not heavy stuff. I highly recommend it as a summer class. I've also had Slonim (for a different class) and I did not like her at all... found her to be a biased marker too.

Thank you guys so much! I'm really relieved, decided to scrap Anthro and Linguisitcs altogether and add a couple other things.

Thanks for your help!

I had Dr. Thomas for linguistics but not for 1A03, but 1AA3. he was our substitute prof when dr. Stroinska was in a skiing accident. He was okay, although he talks about one slide for a long time before moving on to the next slide. For 1A03 however, I had Dr. Moro. She was a great prof and really helpful too.

I'm taking Ling 1A03 with G. Thomas right now. Ling all the way. He's really nice and has a cool British accent. D:

The mark breakdown is:

10% assignment 1
10% assignment 2
10% assignment 3
10% attendance (just show up and get the marks)
20% midterm
40% final