Shopping for Classes, Part 3

To register for classes, you sign onto HKU Portal and click on Student Connect. To register classes, you find individual lectures on the “Optional Courses” search page and scroll down the list. Once you find it, you click on it, which prompts you for a lecture selection, which almost always is “A” since most classes don’t have enough enrollment to warrant multiple lectures and professors. Make sure to save between adding classes.

When you add a class, a “TS” appears next to it, meaning the department offering the course has to approve you for that specific course. If the department doesn’t approve you, you get a “TN” and if you’re approved, you get sent for approval by your super-departmental faculty, which while pending is assigned “TW.” Once you get a “TW,” you’re pretty much approved, but they can still deny your selection, giving you a “TN.” If all goes well, all your classes are now “TA” or fully approved to take.

Upon attending class, you are told to sign up for a tutorial (what I would call a section), the times of which are not publicized nor solidified. If you have a problem making any of the tutorial slots, say if you have lectures during each of the tutorials offered, then you should talk to the TA and or professor so that you can be accommodated.

Some classes have a convenient sign-up process online, which serves to confuse in its own right. It’s a competition to sign up for tutorials first so that you get the best time slot, which basically means it is neither too late in the day nor too early in the morning, considering existing schedule blocks for other lectures. The tutorial enrollment is only compared to the lecture enrollment once the add/drop period ends.

Needless to say, I have now finished registration in its entirety.

It was painful to go through, and seemed to add more corners that needed desperately to be cut off. Why couldn’t the Student Connect system for lecture registration be integrated with tutorial registration for better convenience in schedule arrangement? It would make logistics smoother and more operable, allowing professors and TAs to teach rather than arrange tutorial slots for the masses.

So now I’ve attended all of my tutorials at least once. With tutorials having started on the third week of instruction, I’ve already been to all my lectures at least two or three times by this point (with the exception of Cantonese, which has no tutorials), and for the most part, they have been good.

For my Traditional Chinese Society class (SOCI0052) the enrollment stands at thirteen students, split into two tutorials led by the professor himself. Last week, we had a typhoon level eight, which canceled morning and early afternoon classes, so we were all lumped into one section. This week, however, the two tutorials met separately, and mine only has five students. We presented our proposals for the ethnographic research project due in a month, and apparently mine was a good idea (details forthcoming).

For Hong Kong and the World (POLI0019), the tutorial was relaxed and focused on discussions of the readings and the lectures specifically (as the professor usually brings guest speakers in). We went over Hong Kong’s global competitive as a haven for multinational companies and international financial institutions and speculated as to its ability to maintain any such competitiveness.

In the tutorial for Introduction to Arts of Asia: Past and Present (FINE1008), the professor served as the tutorial leader, though she has one TA for her class. There, we discussed the major artworks (of various mediums) and went over the nitty gritties that we were to be tested on later.

In the tutorial for Phonetics (LING2004), my particular section saw the professor teaching. He went over a homework assignment that we have to turn in by next Wednesday. Though his approach is explicitly observational, I still feel that he’s trying to prescriptively teach the local students how to speak English like an American or a Brit.

For Humanity in Globalization (POLI0078), I just had my first tutorial. The lecture immediately prior, we watched a documentary on the Rwandan Genocide, to which we reflected upon in tutorial. While really quite depressing, the syllabus has topics in the future that involve logos whereas these first two weeks have really invoked the shock factor and pathos.

“Peux ce que veux,” non?