School is kind of a mixed bag this year. My courses are not so inter-connected as they usually are, though they're all drawing on previous courses. Language and Gender is a second year course with a lot of frosh in the class, so there's a lot of "here's how do your readings!" and lectures about plagiarism and planning your time and "stereotypes are overly general." Really?

On the other hand, here's a random bit from my Sociolinguistic Variation and Change readings from last night:

"A similar concern with accountability to the data subsequently became the hallmark of variationist work; Labov's principle of accountability extends the general philosophy of accountability to a specifiable procedure which is the cornerstone of quantitative method... Replacing induction with a hypothetico-deductive mode of reasoning, the generativists argued that no corpus of data, however large, can usefully serve as a basis for linguistic generalizations since any corpus is a partial and accidental collection of utterances."

It's a 4000 level seminar-type course, so the learning curve is a bit steeper. It's interesting to switch gears between classes--I'm expected to know so much more in some classes than others, so I relax in the lower-level ones and then have to kick into a higher gear when I get to Sociolinguistics.

I'm going to apply to at least two programs for next year:
1) York's Graduate Program in Theoretical Linguistics (Master's)
2) Centennial College's Book and Magazine Publishing (which involves a lot of editing)

If I get into both (ha!), I have NO IDEA what I will do.